


Circumnavigate

by balios_and_xanthos



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (and the sex), (somewhat), Arya comes back, F/M, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Canon, Sequel, Unresolved Sexual Tension, definitely an isosceles triangle, i'm just here for the banter, lord gendry, love triangle (ish)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-04-12 00:04:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19120471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balios_and_xanthos/pseuds/balios_and_xanthos
Summary: "There was also a raven from Tyrosh, milord. A curious missive, I almost didn’t want to trouble you with it. It says that your friend Arry will be docking at the harbor at Storm’s End in three days’ time and most urgently wishes to see you.”In which Arya comes back, and shit's changed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I’d promised myself that my last fic would get this ship out of my system once and for all, but here we are… This takes place in the same universe as [No Parting Glances](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18876637/chapters/44805499), but it can certainly be read as a standalone if lovelorn angst isn’t your thing. Chapter One out of I have no fucking idea how many.

In the eighteenth year of the reign of King Bran the Broken, towards the end of a long but not particularly bitter winter, the Stormlands experienced a period of unprecedented fine weather that confounded the expectations of the Maesters and drove half the kingdom into a frenzy of sun worship. Unfortunately for him, Lord Gendry Baratheon of Storm’s End was too busy with the affairs of state to make much enjoyment of this respite from the winter storms. The best he could do was to occasionally take a walk on the battlements with his wife, the Lady Alyse of Tarth. On one particularly fine afternoon during that year, the Lady Alyse, her arm linked through her husband’s as they took their customary stroll, was updating Gendry on their daughter’s progress with Septa Lynnea. 

“She said Shireen’s High Valyrian is becoming quite masterful,” Alyse said. Calling their daughter Shireen had been Ser Davos’s idea. Neither he nor Gendry were superstitious men, so they hadn’t blamed the choice of name for the continuation of what seemed to be the Baratheon inability to produce a legitimate male heir; after seventeen years of marriage, Shireen remained Gendry and Alyse’s only child. Had his own biography been less full of twists, turns, and sudden elevations in fortune, Gendry might have felt a bit more relaxed about this state of affairs. Times were changing in Westeros; if Sansa Stark could pass her own name on to her children rather than that of her husband, why couldn’t Shireen? But even though Gendry had long since resigned himself to the fact that he was likely to feel like an imposter until the day he died, he didn’t want Shireen to ever suffer a moment’s discomfort because of his flaunting of convention. It would be easier for everyone involved if he simply had a son.

But that was an old, familiar worry, one which he could leave alone for now; it wasn’t going anywhere. “Has she been behaving herself?” he asked.

“That I’m not so sure about. She had – ” Alyse lowered her voice. “I found a bit of hay in her hair at the evening meal yesterday.”

Gendry groaned. Shireen had recently taken a shine to one of the stable boys; he would have gelded the lad, if he’d thought it would dampen her ardor. “It could be worse. At least she didn’t have hay in her hair at breakfast,” he said glumly. Alyse smacked his arm, laughing. “Would you please make sure she’s supervised in the afternoons?”

“She is! But she’s clever, she finds ways to distract the Septa. There, there,” Alyse said, when this seemed to distress him further. “I don’t think she’d ever do anything to make you truly ashamed.”

“That’s because you were always a good girl,” Gendry sighed. “She’s more like me in that regard. The only reason I wasn’t rebellious was because I couldn’t afford to be. Who knows what a monster I would have been if I’d been spoiled the way she’s been.”

“She isn’t a monster!” Alyse said. “Come, now, I know how much you dote on her.”

“Of course I dote on her, I’m just not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep her virtue intact.”

They had arrived at the edge of the battlements. “I’m going to go lie down for a while. Will you be at the training pitch?” Alyse asked. Several years ago, Gendry had noticed himself growing slightly thicker around the middle; in a thus far successful attempt to avoid his father’s corpulent fate, he had shunned drink and trained daily with a sword ever since. He knew that Alyse was grateful for the care he took in maintaining his figure, although by that point in their marriage she had long since stopped letting him share her bed with any frequency. Gendry occasionally tried reminding her that if they wanted to produce an heir, they weren’t going about it in the right way, to no avail. (He never said, because it would have sounded too much like a threat, that he was a man with urges and that he would be tempted to meet them elsewhere if they were not met at home. It had become easier, much easier, to withstand this particular temptation as he got older. He was proud of himself for only having given in to it a handful of times when he was still a very young man.) 

Despite all this, Gendry felt very lucky in his choice of companion. When he’d first been installed as Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, Gendry’s advisor Marten had suggested that marrying into a family with roots in the local nobility might help consolidate his position and give him some much-needed insight into regional politics. He had selected Alyse, despite her family’s relatively minor standing, because she was the only one from the list of likely candidates who didn’t wrinkle her nose at his Flea Bottom accent and who seemed to find his awkwardness at high social gatherings endearing rather than embarrassing. It didn’t hurt that she was cousin to Ser Brienne. On this basis, he had expected – perhaps hoped for – another lady warrior, but Alyse was one of the gentlest souls he had ever met. One of the kindest, too. 

“No, I trained this morning,” he said “I have some business to attend to with Marten.” A stack of raven scrolls, to be precise. Alyse patted him sympathetically on the shoulder and left him at the far edge of the battlements, where he stopped a while to take in the view of Shipbreaker Bay. The sky was so clear it was easy to imagine he could see clear over the bay and the Rainwood and halfway across the sea to Dorne. Gendry marveled a little at the fact that he’d come to a point in his life where a view this spectacular had become such an ordinary part of his day-to-day existence as to render it completely mundane. He lingered there for some time, all the same.

~

The business with Marten took up the rest of the afternoon. Gendry insisted on personally going through all correspondence addressed to him, despite how time-consuming it could be. Although many of the scrolls would eventually be forwarded to other parties, he still thought it important to know what was going on in his lands and what his people expected of him. 

“And here we have another complaint about the King’s Landing road, milord,” said Marten, waving a scroll at Gendry with what for him passed as insouciance. “Apparently the snowmelt has caused the ford to flood.”

“Why these people think I’m capable of doing a damn thing about the weather, I have no idea.”

“I would say it is because they think very highly of you, milord, but I believe we both know it is because they simply don’t know any better,” Marten said. He had been assisting Gendry ever since he was installed at Storm’s End eighteen years ago. It had taken Gendry a long time to trust him, because his manner of speech was so unfailingly formal and because Gendry, in those early years, had been disappointed not to have Davos with him, but he had proved to be a capable and loyal advisor. 

“Well, pass that one on to Brandon, too. Was that everything?” Gendry asked, tossing the latest scroll onto the pile on his desk. The sun was slanting orange through the high windows of the council chamber; the evening meal would be ready soon. 

“Not quite, milord. There was also a raven from Tyrosh. A curious missive, I almost didn’t want to trouble you with it. It says that your friend Arry will be docking at the harbor at Storm’s End in three days’ time and most urgently wishes to see you.”

“Arry? I don’t – ” he said, stopping short. He hadn’t remembered the name until he’d said it out loud. “Give it here,” he said.

Marten handed it the scroll over, his brows arched with curiosity. The parchment was rough, weathered, and scrawled over with – was that her handwriting? Gendry wasn't sure he'd ever seen it before. He was still a slow reader, and it took him some moments to take in the words. When he was through, he sat back in his chair.

Marten must have mistaken the stunned look on his face for confusion. “I shall ignore it, of course, milord.”

Gendry put the parchment down and stood, gripping the edge of the desk. “You shall do nothing of the sort. Please tell Baelor to make ready the best guest quarters and inform Lady Alyse that we will be having visitors.”

Marten took in his master’s tense bearing, the odd smile forming on his face, and said, his voice tinged with concern, “Milord, may I inquire as to who… what…?”

“Don’t worry, Marten. Arry is one of my oldest friends, and she’s been gone from Westeros these eighteen years. It shall be our honor to host her.”

Marten’s eyes widened with comprehension. “Oh. Oh, I see.”

“Yes. You see.” As Marten turned to leave the room, Gendry wondered: why the secrecy? Had there been some purpose to her using a code name, or had she just been teasing him? Better to err on the side of caution, he supposed. “Marten?”

“Yes, milord?”

“Please tell know no one of this apart from the Lady Alyse. I’ll tell Shireen myself.”

As soon as Marten left the room, Gendry fell back into his chair. There had been no real news of Arya since she left eighteen years ago. Rumors, yes, of a pirate ship helmed by a lady captain who tore out the throats of her enemies with her teeth and similar nonsense, but no real news. And now she was sailing to Storm’s End. He had a sneaking suspicion that there would be trouble, later, but he allowed himself this moment, alone in the council chambers before the bell rang for the evening meal, to be happy that such miracles were possible.

~

Over the next few days, Gendry struggled to conceal his sense of unease from Alyse and Shireen and Marten and all the rest of them. The castle had never seemed smaller. (He knew how ridiculous this was.) He had no idea how to prepare himself for Arya's visit, because he had never once let himself imagine that he would see her again. He had been heartbroken for a month or two after she had left, and then resentful, and then once he had made his peace with her decision he had forgiven and slowly forgotten about her. In his mind’s eye, Arya was preserved as she had been at eighteen, all quick tongue and flashing eyes. What would she make of him now – an aging politician with boring problems and thinning hair. He didn’t delude himself into thinking that he was in _such_ poor condition, but still. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d swung a hammer. 

The night before she was due to arrive, Gendry went to the armory and took out his dragonglass mace for the first time in years. After dusting it off, he swung it a few times, surprised to find that the handle still fit nicely in the palms of his hands. During the rare occasions upon which he’d felt compelled to take it down before, it had always been with a sense of dread. Now, the evil memories it brought up seemed more like a long-forgotten bedtime story, something gruesome intended to frighten children that bore no resemblance to anything real.

And yet it all had been real. The dead, and their king, and Arya leaping out of the darkness. How much of herself had she sacrificed, he wondered, in order to save them all? He shivered, put the mace back onto the rack, and felt strangely comforted that a few of his memories still had the power to chill him to the bone.

~

The next day, around noon, a sentry arrived at the castle with the news that a ship with a direwolf banner had been spotted sailing on a good wind to the southwest of Tarth, in the direction of the harbor. Gendry raced down from the battlements – after being unable to sleep the night before, he’d been too tired to train, too unfocused to get much work done, and had spent most of the morning scanning the horizon for ships – and bid the servants fetch his wife and daughter and make ready the horses. It was a long ride down to the harbor, and much too treacherous for a carriage, but they would likely get there before she did if they hurried.

Indeed, by the time they arrived one could just make out the sails of her ship – was that her at the helm? Marten arranged the servants and retainers they had brought with them in a line at the landward edge of the dock, while Gendry and his small family stood waiting for the rowboat that carried Arya and what appeared to be a few of her crew members towards them. “Low tide, dear, ought they not have waited?” Alyse asked.

“I’m sure Arya knows what she’s doing.”

As one of the crew scampered up a ladder to make fast the moorings, Gendry approached the edge of the dock. Alyse and Shireen hung back to give him a moment with Arya in private. He glanced back at them, unable to keep the excitement off his face, and Alyse gave him a weak smile in return. She was being remarkably forbearing about the whole business, for which Gendry was immensely grateful. He knew that most wives wouldn’t be so indulgent. Shireen, in contrast, was practically vibrating with anticipation, holding onto her mother’s hand. It gladdened him to see her so full of childlike enthusiasm. When she was a little girl, she had made Gendry tell her the story of Arya Stark’s slaying of the Night King dozens of times, never knowing what a painful episode it was for him to revisit. He came to mention his own minor role in the proceedings less and less; eventually, it became possible for him to pretend that he hadn’t been a part of it at all, to the extent that Shireen had been surprised, a year or two ago, to hear someone refer to her father as a hero of the Battle of Winterfell.

Arya’s head appeared above the edge of the dock, and then she was climbing the ladder, and then she was in front of him. At the last second, something stopped him from hugging her; he clasped her hands between his instead. She stared at him as if he were mad before tugging him into an embrace, her chin resting on his shoulder. To do this, she had to stand on tiptoe. 

“But she’s so little!” Gendry heard Shireen say to his wife behind them; Arya heard it, too, if their simultaneous laughter was anything to go by. 

When they parted, Gendry saw that her eyes were slightly damp. No wonder; she had been gone from home for such a long time. _And she came to see me first._ “It’s good to see you, friend,” she said, taking his mind off such idle thoughts.

“It’s good to see you, too. So? What’s west of Westeros?”

“A lot of water. And then Essos,” she said. 

“Hmm, that’s a bit disappointing.”

“I wouldn’t call anything about my travels disappointing.” 

Indeed, she looked well. Very well. Her face had thinned out over the years, and he noticed with a pang that her hair was starting to gray around the edges, but there was a blush high on her cheeks and a lightness to her step that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her. Middle age suited her. Gendry didn’t say any of this out loud, not with Alyse in earshot. “Shireen is very excited to hear about them. As am I,” he said.

“Your daughter?” she said, looking over his shoulder. She smiled at them both with real warmth. “It’ll be good to speak the Common Tongue again. My crew is mostly Volantene now.”

“Was there a mutiny?” he said, teasing.

“No, but it’s too long a story for the docks. I heard Ser Davos passed away.”

Gendry nodded. “A few months ago.”

“I’m sorry. I know he was very dear to you.”

“I hadn’t seen him for almost two years before he died, unfortunately. But yes, he was. Very dear to me.” He winced at how evasive and dissembling this sounded and wondered if she was disappointed in him. 

But Arya seemed preoccupied with something – or someone – on the boat. She leaned back over the edge of the dock. “Eddard, come up here and meet everyone,” she yelled before turning to Gendry with a long-suffering sigh. “He’s very shy sometimes. I’m not sure where he gets it from.”

 _Eddard?_ Gendry thought, perplexed. Had Westerosi naming customs spread so far? She had tossed the name out with such an air of command that it seemed more likely to belong to a servant than an intimate companion, although who knew – Arya had always been one to dispense with niceties. A flash of jealousy darkened his mind at the thought. 

Before this could trouble him very much, a tall, well-built lad, maybe nineteen or twenty years old and dressed in homespun sailors’ rags, hoisted himself up onto the dock and glared sullenly around at all and sundry. Gendry wouldn’t have spared him a second glance, except that when they locked eyes it was like looking into a mirror. Same proud cheekbones, same supple lip, same tidy brown hair. He had a slightly wounded look about him, which Gendry hadn’t seen on his own face in years but which he recognized, instantly, from his youth. Something in the set of his eyes that reminded Gendry of his mother.

The boy seemed taken aback, but Gendry felt as if the dock had fallen away from under his feet. His hands were shaking, his vision narrowing to dizzy points. Eighteen years. What had they done?

“Arya,” he hissed, grabbing her arm when she started to turn away from him. “Arya, who is _that_?”

“This is Eddard. I used to call him Ned, but he insists on Eddard now,” she said. The boy looked between the two of them, his features tightening with betrayal, and Gendry thought, _she didn’t tell him, either_. Arya paused, as if to savor his mounting alarm. Then she added, with an impish kind of smile, “He’s your son.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The immediate aftermath of Arya’s bombshell. This one’s much longer than I’d intended, and talky, but our man has a lot of explaining to do. 
> 
> Or: in which Gendry starts off the chapter wanting to kill Arya but is already flirting with her again by the end.

“He’s your son.”

Gendry stood rooted to the spot. He felt a bit sick, and he was suddenly acutely aware of the sound of a gull crying overhead, the glare of sunlight off the water. He squinted up at the sky for a moment, still in too much shock to think or speak or feel anything, really, apart from a kind of numb devastation. His son. He had a son. This stranger dressed like a Ghiscari pirate was his son. With Arya. 

Dimly, he heard Arya say, “Eddard, this is your father, Lord Gendry Baratheon.” 

What was he supposed to do? Shake the boy’s hand? He heard himself laugh raggedly. The boy was staring at him with mingled curiosity and trepidation, and Arya, damn her, already seemed ready to move on, as if with three words she hadn’t just upturned his entire life. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your family?” she asked.

“Stop. Just stop for a moment,” he said quietly, mindful that Alyse and Shireen would certainly be able to hear him if he raised his voice. He pointed at the boy. “You’re telling me that this is my son.”

“Obviously,” she said, and oh, how he hated the smug flippancy in her voice, even though he knew, had known since he laid eyes on him and did the sums in his head, that there was no point in denying that the boy was his.

“All right. I accept that,” he said, voice cracking as he began to lose his composure. “What I don’t accept, what you’re going to have to take some pains to explain to me, is how in seven hells could you not tell me, not come back to see me, not even send me a fucking raven for eighteen years when you had my son with you the whole time?”

“I wanted you to meet him,” Arya said – the cheek of her, she actually seemed a bit offended. “Why do you think I came here first, before Winterfell or King’s Landing or anywhere else?”

“You keep my son hidden from me for decades and I’m supposed to be grateful for that?”

“Yes, you bloody are. I haven’t seen my family since I left!”

“You say that like it wasn’t your choice! You could have turned around!”

“In the middle of an uncharted ocean I was supposed to just _turn around_?”

“What better place _to_ turn around?” he bellowed. Even after all these years, Gendry still had a tendency to slip back into his old manner of speech when he was emotional; he hoped that the servants at least would garner some amusement from the sight of their Lord master ranting like a Flea Bottom innkeeper. 

Thinking of his servants made him think, too late, of his family. Gendry turned to see Alyse covering her mouth with her hand, horrified. Shireen was tugging on her mother’s sleeve and staring with wild-eyed avidity at the boy, who hadn’t lifted his gaze from the dock since Arya and Gendry – good gods, since his _parents_ – had started yelling at each other. His face was browned with too much sun, but not so brown that Gendry didn’t notice the flush creeping up his neck. 

Gendry looked back at his wife in mute apology, which only seemed to magnify her distress. She started up the hill towards the horses, dragging Shireen with her, and ignored Gendry when he called her name. The sight of her turning her back on him like that filled him with panic; Alyse was a sweet and forgiving woman, but she was also very sensitive, and he knew that she would feel the embarrassment of this acutely. “I need to go see to my wife and daughter now. You,” he said to the boy. “Go back to your ship.”

“Don’t you dare speak to him like that!” Arya said. “If he can’t come, then I won’t either.”

Gendry sighed. It was too late, in any event. Alyse and Shireen had mounted their horses and were riding up towards the castle already, Marten and the retainers they had brought following in a confused procession behind them; he thought he could hear Shireen’s voice raised in protest. “Forgive me. I was offended on behalf of my family, but that is no excuse for rudeness. This is all a terrible shock. As you knew it would be,” he said to Arya. 

“It’s all right, I don’t want to go with you, either,” the boy said. Hearing his voice made Gendry’s stomach flip over. “Mother, let’s go back to the ship.”

“No, Eddard. I think we should let your Lord father decide. Are we welcome in your home, or will you turn out your oldest friend in the world, and your child, in the name of propriety?”

He scanned her face for a sign of understanding, patience, _anything_ but this inexplicable anger. What had she expected of him? Had she been away from civilized company for so long that she had forgotten how even these most basic things worked?

Arya scoffed. “Come on, Eddard.”

“No,” Gendry said. “No, I – ” He didn’t want them to leave, but he couldn’t bring himself to offer any words of welcome, either. “Come to the castle. We have some horses for you, just…” He looked distastefully over at the ship, which he had regarded with such anticipation mere minutes ago. “Have someone fetch your things, I’ll ride ahead and have someone accompany you up the road.”

“Our things are already on the boat,” Arya said. “We travel light.”

“Good, well. Follow me, then,” he said, waving awkwardly at nothing. As he turned around, he thought he saw Arya and the boy raise their eyebrows at each other, which irritated him to no end. 

Of the few members of Gendry’s household that were still waiting next to the dock, the only one important enough to introduce to Arya was his master of stables. During that strange period of time after the sack of King’s Landing but before the meeting at the Dragonpit, the slain Dragon Queen’s master of war had allowed Gendry to bring a small company of Dothraki and Unsullied with him to the Stormlands in case he should meet any resistance taking Storm’s End. Most of them had returned to Essos, in the end, but one of the Dothraki, after confessing to Gendry that the sight of the army of the dead had given him a horror of war that he was neither willing nor able to shake, had asked to stay on rather than rejoin the rest of his countrymen. His name was Remekko, but most people at Storm’s End called him Roy. 

When he presented him to Arya, Roy nodded and said, “I remember the lady. I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl. I was there at Winterfell, when you fought the Night King.” Normally, Gendry quite enjoyed Roy’s familiarity, which most other Lords would have taken for impudence and not tolerated, but Gendry wasn’t in the mood for levity right now. 

“I was hardly a little girl, then.”

“Hmm,” he said. Was it Gendry’s imagination, or did Roy look a little bit amused as he looked back and forth between the three of them? The boy still seemed mortified, although he handled his horse well enough. Gendry hadn’t known how to explain his presence, so he hadn’t introduced him at all. 

Gendry led the way up the road to the castle, although he found himself continually looking backwards at – Eddard? Gendry had never liked that name very much, another thing to be cross with Arya about – at the boy, his heart skipping every time he did so. He felt a strange compulsion to ride next to him, the better to be able to examine him, but he had no idea what he could say to the lad, and the thought of actually attempting to strike up a conversation with him made him feel distinctly ill. 

About halfway up the incline to the castle, Gendry couldn’t tolerate this anymore and doubled back to tell Roy that he was going to ride ahead. He spared one last glance at Arya, who looked back at him with something like sadness, and the boy, who ignored him entirely, before cantering off up the hill. 

He had almost reached the castle gates when a slight figure standing at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the bay caught his attention. She saw him, too. “Father!” 

“Shireen? What are you doing out here?” He experienced a brief moment of fear, seeing her so close to the precipice, but Shireen had grown up walking those paths and was as sure-footed as a mountain goat.

“Waiting for you,” she said. “I slipped out after Mother went to her chambers. It wasn’t very hard. Everyone’s so distracted.”

He dismounted and led the horse over to her. A wind picked up and ruffled the grass along the edge of the cliff; it was such a beautiful day. Shireen’s face was uncharacteristically inscrutable, her gaze steady on her father’s as he struggled to think of something to say. “Look, I’m sorry about all this,” he said, finally. 

She nodded. “So,” she said. “I have a brother?”

“It seems so.”

“And Arya Stark is his mother?”

“Yes, she is.” He’d thought those facts to be blindingly obvious by that point, but everyone coped with grief differently, he supposed. Shireen looked mistily out over the bay; all he could hope for was that she would one day bring herself to forgive him, even if she always thought less of him.

“This is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

It took Gendry a moment to understand what she’d said, it made so little sense. “What?”

Shireen turned back towards him, her face brightening. “Do you think she’d teach me how to fight?”

“You’ve never been interested in fighting,” he said, incredulous.

“I would be if Arya Stark could teach me.” 

Although it was hard not to be glad that Shireen didn’t hate him, he found just as much reason to worry about this response as he would have had she reacted with shame, or fury. “No, Shireen. It’s not good to idolize people, even people who’ve done great things,” he said. “Arya Stark is a very dangerous woman.”

“But you – ” She looked around as if worried that Septa Lynnea might overhear her. “You had a _child_ with her,” she said, her voice full of insinuation. Gendry cursed the fate that had led him to have such a conversation with his maiden daughter; he could feel the heat rising in his cheeks. “How old were you? How old was she?” 

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. When Shireen continued to stare at him expectantly, he sighed and said, “Arya is five years younger than I am, and she left eighteen years ago. You work it out.”

“So my brother is two years older than me. I’ve always wanted a brother.”

“I know you have,” he said sadly. Whether that angry-looking boy on the docks had always wanted a little sister, Gendry very much doubted. And who knew, perhaps he already had one. Or several. There was no reason to think that Arya had lived like a septa these past eighteen years. Perhaps she had a whole brood of bastard children waiting on that ship down there.

He could see Arya and the boy riding up the last stretch of the hill, looking off to the north as Roy pointed out some land formation or another. “I have to go speak to your mother,” he said. This was true enough, but it was mostly an excuse to flee. 

“Can I show them to their chambers?” Shireen asked.

“Of course you can,” he said, giving her a fond pat on the shoulder. He knew that she would enjoy it a lot more than he would. 

Gendry led the horse inside the gates, throwing the reins at a stable boy, and jogged across the yard in the direction of his family’s private quarters, for once not caring who saw him behaving in such an undignified manner. Marten waylaid him just as he was passing his own rooms. “Milord, if you would spare a moment?” 

“What is it?” Gendry asked, impatient.

“Forgive me, milord. The last thing I want is to give you offense, but I have to ask – ”

“Yes, the boy is my son,” he said, attempting to spare the poor man some embarrassment. 

But Marten didn’t seem fazed, or even particularly surprised. He looked around nervously before leaning in to whisper, “I propose that we keep this quiet for the time being, until we decide on the best course of action.”

“Is that even possible, after the scene I made?”

“Well, I don’t believe any of the household could hear you, milord. We were standing quite apart from you. They might suspect, but unless we confirm their suspicions with an outright declaration, rumors are all that will come of it.”

Gendry had serious doubts about this, but he was willing to trust Marten’s judgement. “Roy already figured it out, anyway.”

“And you confirmed it?” Marten said, aghast.

“No. Well, he didn’t actually say anything, but I could tell by the way he looked at me. And anyway, the man has eyes, doesn’t he?”

“Well, quite,” Marten said, regarding at his master warily. 

“I’m sorry, Marten,” Gendry said, knowing that he was far from the last person he would have to apologize to that day.

“Not at all, milord. Most men in your position that I know of have at least three bastard children tucked away somewhere. Part of the territory.”

~

Somehow, Gendry didn’t think that this argument would hold much water with his wife. He found her sitting on a lounge in her chambers, her long hair unbound and a bit tangled on the pillow, her eyes red and a handkerchief spread neatly across her lap. When he came in, she only briefly glanced over at him before looking back out the window.

“Alyse,” he said, a little out of breath. 

Before he could say anything else, she sniffed, asked, “Is she back on the ship?”

Gendry sighed and sat down on the lounge a few feet away from her, not sure that she would welcome closer proximity. “She was on her way up to the castle, the last I saw her.”

“You let her come into our home?”

“She has my son with her. I know it’s difficult for everybody, you most of all, and I’m very sorry about that, but he’s my son.”

“So it’s true, then.”

“I’m so sorry, my love. You must know that I had no idea.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” she said, quite dispassionately. For a moment, it looked as though any strong emotion she felt about the situation might have passed, at least momentarily. But then she winced and put her hand over her eyes. 

“Oh, Alyse. I hate to see you suffer like this.”

“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked “It’s not that it happened. I could make my peace with that, in time. It’s that I didn’t know.”

“Well, I didn’t know, either,” he said. 

“That’s not what I mean.” She sounded annoyed, as if he were deliberately missing the point. And perhaps he was; this was not a conversation he’d been looking forward to.

“I told you I wanted to marry her,” he said desperately.

“You didn’t tell me you fucked her,” Alyse said. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard his wife use that word; it almost made him laugh.

“I thought you knew,” he said. “Everyone knew.” They hadn’t exactly been subtle. Indeed, he had been a figure of pity for a while afterwards. 

“How many times?” she asked after a fraught pause.

“Once just before the battle at Winterfell, once just after, and once a few days after the meeting at the Dragonpit. That must have been when… you know.”

Alyse looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and outrage. “You lay with a girl three times and it never occurred to you that she might be with child?”

“No! I thought she’d drink moon tea, or…” He couldn’t bring himself to lie to her, not when he was already so humbled before her. “To be honest, the thought never crossed my mind.”

“It never does, with you men. I thought you were different, though. I thought you were better.” Her lower lip wobbled, a single tear splashing it, and for a moment Gendry hated Arya for doing this to her even more than he hated her for spoiling their reunion. She could have written, she could have kept the boy on the ship until they’d had time to smooth things over, she could have done any number of things to prevent Alyse from suffering in this way. Alyse recoiled from him when he tried to put his arm around her. “Did you love her?”

He hadn’t been expecting this question; he had to think about it for a moment. “I was twenty-three, close enough to a virgin, and she was willing to bed me. She was also one of the only friends I had during two of the most difficult times in my life. I wanted her as much as I’d ever wanted anything, at the time. Whether that means I loved her, I don’t know. You’d have to ask a poet.” At Alyse’s crumpled face, he said, “But I know I love you. We’ve been married for seventeen years, we have a child – ” he paused to amend this, “We’ve raised a child together.”

“Do you love her now?”

He sighed with exasperation. “She hid my son from me for eighteen years, so I’m not feeling very warmly towards her at the moment.”

“Are you going to make him your heir?”

“No! I don’t even know the lad. Shireen is my heir.” That time, when he put his arms around her, she wilted into them, let him stroke her hair and press kisses onto the top of her head. “Whatever happens, remember, you are my wife, and Shireen is my heir. Nothing will change that.” He sat there with her until she had finished crying.

~

Gendry had another restless night, and the next morning he crept down his own hallway like a thief, afraid of running into Arya or the boy or his wife or any number of other people. Frustrated by this state of affairs but unwilling, as yet, to do anything about it, he ate breakfast by himself and retired to the training pitch. He had a great deal of work to do that day – indeed, he had been too scatter-brained the last few days to get much done, so he had some catching up to do. A raven announcing the end of winter had arrived two days prior, which meant that there was a feast to organize. However, he so desperately needed the distraction that exerting himself provided, despite his exhaustion, that he trained for half an hour longer than usual.

“That’s enough,” he said, much to the relief of his training partner, once his arms started to shake. 

“I’d heard you’d become quite handy with a sword.”

He spun around to find Arya watching him from the edge of the training pitch. Arms folded across her chest, she looked as though she’d been idling there for quite some time, and perhaps she had. “Is that a challenge?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t fight anymore.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.” Worn out from his training, he found it difficult to muster up the same kind of anger he’d been roiling with before. 

“What happened to your hammer?” she asked.

“You’re not the only one that’s changed.” He took extra care in putting his training sword away, watched her out of the corner of his eye as he toweled his face and took a drink from a skin of water. He’d forgotten about her tendency to sit there and stare at him for far longer than was appropriate; he vaguely remembered finding this thrilling the last time he’d seen her; right now, he only wished she had chosen a time to do it when he wasn’t exhausted and covered in sweat.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Gendry shook his head. “We’ve needed to talk for eighteen years, Arya. You can wait another day, until I’m less cross with you.”

“Are you sure you’ll be less cross with me tomorrow?”

“No,” he said, laughing a little. They looked at each other across the training pitch, she patient, he relenting. “Let’s go to my council chambers. There’s nothing there I can stab you with.”

On the way back indoors, he had to take her past the little forge he’d had built for himself when he’d first been installed at Storm’s End. It had been a welcome retreat for him for the first few years that he was there, but as time went on and he became busier with his family and his responsibilities he’d begun to go there less and less. A few years prior, he’d allowed his master of arms to start using it as a store room, and it was now full of archery targets and sandbags. Thankfully, Arya didn’t notice any of this, seemed quite serious and lost in thought as she walked next to him in silence. She still wore her hair in a bun, he noticed, but it was slightly longer in the back, and she was wearing some sort of trinket on a chain around her neck. Otherwise, she dressed much like she had when she was eighteen, like a high Lord who wasn’t worried about impressing anybody. 

Gendry retreated behind his desk as soon as they arrived, and it was odd, sitting at his desk with Arya in front of it like she was one of his underlings, but he decided that he rather liked it. She didn’t settle into a chair right away, paced up and down the sides of the room for a moment looking at the tapestries on the walls. 

“Renly put those up, ages ago,” Gendry explained. “They’re a bit expensive for my taste, but when I first got here I didn’t think I had the right to take them down, and by now I’ve gotten used to them. Please, sit.”

She grabbed the chair in which Marten usually sat at a respectful distance and dragged it as close as she could to the front of his desk, although this still meant that they were separated by three feet of oak. She seemed to be contemplating putting her feet up, and Gendry was grateful when she didn’t. 

“You wanted to talk,” he said. “So, talk.” For some reason, this made her grin at him as if he’d told a particularly funny joke. “What?” he asked. 

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, you haven’t changed as much as you think.” He rolled his eyes, no longer in the mood for such banter, and she said, “Fine. You’re angry with me. Why?”

“Right. Two main things,” he said. He’d planned this part out the night before, when he couldn’t sleep. “First, I’m angry about what you did to Alyse.” At her blank look, he added, “My wife?”

“What did I do to your wife?” she asked, seeming genuinely confused. She wasn’t following the script; so much for planning. 

“Showing up with my bastard child like that? She’s utterly devastated.”

“Why would it matter to her? You weren’t married to her when we were together. You hadn’t even met her.”

Gendry laughed bitterly. “Look, Arya, I know you’ve been on a ship with a load of men for a long time, so I’m not sure if you’ve just forgotten how women over here view these things or if you’re being deliberately dense.”

She shrugged. “I never really did understand women over here, I suppose. Even though I supposedly am one.”

“Are there women in other places that you do understand?” he asked, although that certainly wasn't in the script, either.

She smiled a bit cryptically. “We came across a tribe in Ulthos once. The Narai, they’re called. The men work in the households and in the fields, and the women conduct trade. When there’s a war, anyone who wants to fight, can. If a woman wants to take a man to bed, she does, and no one thinks any less of her for it. Those women, I understood.”

“Could you understand their language?” he asked, impressed despite himself.

“We had a translator. But then he was murdered, so we had to make our way on our own for a while.” She paused for a moment, seeming lost in thought. “Or was that the translator who sold us into slavery? I can’t remember. We went through a lot of translators in Ulthos. And I thought Northerners weren’t fond of outsiders…” There was a silence during which Gendry stared at her in mingled awe and horror. “We were talking about your wife, though,” she said.

“Yes, we were,” Gendry said, trying to focus. 

“Do you want me to apologize to her?” Arya asked, obviously uncertain as to whether this was an appropriate course of action.

“Right now I think Alyse would just as soon not speak to you,” he said, still thinking, _she let my son get sold into slavery?_ “But eventually, yes, I think an apology would be welcome.” 

Arya shrugged. “Very well. I can do that.” Gendry nodded, satisfied. “Well?”

“Well?” he asked, still distracted. 

“You said there were two things?”

That, finally, snapped him out of his musings. The second thing was more complicated. He struggled to think of a way to explain his disappointment, or his sadness – anger no longer seemed the right word to describe the way he felt – that wasn’t in itself just a plea for an explanation. _Why didn’t you come back the moment you realized, you knew I would have married you, I would have been the happiest man in Westeros, we could have had a family:_ all the things he couldn’t bring himself to say, because they didn’t feel true anymore, not after all the time that had passed. Arya had never wanted that; they each had made their choices; to look back in regret would be to court madness. Besides, he had a wife, a family that he loved.

So he settled on the most immediate concern. “I have a son. I have a son, and he’s seventeen years old, and I don’t know the first thing about him.” _Except that he got sold into slavery on your watch_ , he thought. He was really going to have to have another talk with her about that, later. “I’d like to forgive you for that, I really would, but to do that I’m going to have to understand why.”

She thought about this for a moment, chewing her lip, before she said, “You want to know why I didn’t bring Eddard here sooner? I didn’t think I was ever coming back, that’s why. We didn’t reach Asshai until he was ten years old. It’s mostly water between here and there, yes, but there are also a lot of islands, and we spent a long time charting them. Until then, I wasn’t sure we ever could go back. No one ever had. And even after we reached the known world again, I didn’t think I ever would. I thought I would rather die than come back here.”

“What changed?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. In eighteen years I didn’t look back once, but suddenly a few months ago the idea that I would never see Westeros again, when I knew that I could – it was just a week’s sail away – I couldn’t take it. I had to come back, just as badly as I had to stay away, before. I think part of it is that Eddard is getting older. I realized I wanted him to meet my family. I wanted him to meet you.”

“Well, that last part’s gone brilliantly so far,” Gendry said, hoping that the sarcasm would hide his embarrassment. 

Arya dismissed this. “He’ll get over it. He doesn’t hold grudges like I do. Ned’s a good lad, you know. He might not know how to bow and scrape, but he’s not uncultured, or unskilled. He speaks four different Valyrian dialects, and the Summer Tongue, and the language of Asshai. I think he might be the first Westerosi in history to speak it like a native. He grew up on the water, so he’s a fine sailor,” she said. 

_My son, a sailor,_ Gendry thought. It seemed impossible. “I’d like to get to know the boy. Although…” He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling faintly ridiculous. “He doesn’t seem very friendly.”

“I don’t remember you being particularly agreeable when you were his age.”

Gendry smiled. “No, and I suppose I turned out all right. He does look an awful lot like me, doesn’t he?” 

She sighed. “He does. I’m always looking for the Stark in him. Sometimes I think he resembles my brother Robb a bit, but it always ends up being a trick of the light. He’s pure Baratheon bastard.” Gendry recoiled a little at this formulation, but she didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t care. “He’s like you in other ways, too. He has your sureness, and your self-doubt. I sometimes had the feeling that you were with me on that ship.”

“Must have been horrible.”

“No,” she said, frowning. “Not horrible. Just strange. I wanted to get away from this place, and I did, but. Having a reminder of home made me homesick, sometimes.” After a pause, she resumed, her voice brighter. “Perhaps I would have been homesick sometimes, anyway.”

“Of course you would have. You’re a human being, Arya, not some… instrument of death.”

“I know that,” she said. “I’m not eighteen anymore.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. He hadn’t intended for that to come out as coyly as it did; he looked away from her afterwards, fearful of what her reaction might be. Eventually, he looked up and saw that she was leaning forward with her hands folded carefully on the desk between them, her eyes wide and earnest. 

“I’m sorry you didn’t know him when he was younger. I’m sorry you’re only meeting him now,” she said. “If I could have done it differently, I would have.”

He wasn’t ready to forgive her yet, but that was when he knew that he would, one day.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter the Third. Or, in which Gendry throws a party, Arya broods convincingly, Alyse is a bit distraught, Roy knows what’s up, Marten quips like a pro, young shitheads act like young shitheads, UST percolates, and Shireen is both smart and adorable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s getting harder and harder to write chapter summaries in a way that doesn’t give away the twist at the end of the first one, lol. Also, it looks like this thing is going to have seven chapters. I promise I won’t get overwhelmed and stop updating after the fifth one. (Oh, yes, I went there.)

On the morning of the first feast of spring, as Gendry left his chambers, he heard the sound of two familiar voices raised in a rough-sounding language that he couldn’t understand. Intrigued, he turned and followed them down the corridor, where he found Eddard and his master of stables, Roy, standing together and laughing. Eddard seemed to be in the middle of telling a story, with Roy offering bits of commentary throughout. Gendry stood there for a moment observing them – was it pride that he felt? Or just loneliness? 

When he became aware of Gendry’s presence, Eddard seemed to cut himself off midsentence. “Please, don’t mind me. You speak Dothraki, too?” Gendry asked the boy, who looked around uncomfortably.

“Valyrian, milord. We were speaking Valyrian,” said Roy. 

“Ah. Apologies,” he said.

“Think nothing of it, milord, one foreign tongue sounds much like another.” 

This was a polite lie, and they all knew it. Gendry cleared his throat. “Well. I’m glad I found you here, Eddard. I was wondering if you’d like to go for a walk around the battlements. It’s more interesting than it sounds. They were supposed to have been built with magic, by the children of the forest.”

“I’m due to meet the lady Shireen right now. Milord,” he said, casting a nervous look at Roy when Gendry flinched at the titles. “She wanted to show me the caverns below the castle.”

That was a much better idea than going for a walk around the battlements. Still, any time Shireen spent entertaining her brother was time not spent kissing impudent stable boys. Gendry could only hope that she wouldn’t tire of Eddard too quickly. “Ah, well. Thank you for humoring her, I’m sure she’s very much looking forward to it,” Gendry said. He loved his daughter dearly, but he couldn’t imagine that a world traveler would find her company very enticing.

The boy shrugged, not looking up at him. “It’s all right. She’s funny.” 

“Good, well. I’m quite busy today, but. I’ll see you at the feast, I suppose.”

The boy nodded. Gendry was disappointed at his continued reticence, but then again Gendry could remember having been naturally distrustful of men in positions of authority when he had been his age. Or perhaps the lad was just shy, like Arya had said. He and Roy watched him depart for a moment. 

“A fine lad, milord,” Roy said. “Congratulations.” After clapping Gendry on the shoulder, he turned and left him there, feeling pleased and mortified in equal measure. 

~

“The whole castle will know by the end of the day, anyway. What’s the point in trying to hide it?”

Gendry had summoned Marten and his wife to the council chambers to discuss the matter of how Eddard’s presence at the feast was to be explained to his vassals and retainers. It was a situation that required some finesse, which was why he desired Marten’s input, and also one that would cause some degree of embarrassment to his family if not handled correctly, which was why he wanted Alyse’s. 

“I agree with you, milord,” said Marten, which surprised him. “To deny his parentage, at this point, would look as though you were ashamed of him. Whether you actually are ashamed of him is neither here nor there,” he said when Alyse looked pointedly at the ground. “To appear so would be… impolitic. This seems to me an ideal opportunity to break the news.”

“Shall I make an announcement?” Gendry asked. 

“I don’t think there’s a need for anything so dramatic as that, milord. Word of these things tends to spread on its own. Introduce him as your son, privately, to a select group of people, and the problem will be solved with a minimum of awkwardness for everyone involved.”

Gendry thought this very sensible. It worried him, however, that Alyse had not uttered a word since she entered the chamber. “Alyse? Do you agree?”

She finally looked up from the ground, and Gendry’s heart sank when he saw the expression on her face. “Must it really be tonight? Only a few days after they arrived?”

Marten raised his eyebrows, already seeming quietly resigned to do something against his better judgment; it was an expression Gendry had seen many times before at council meetings. “My love, everyone is going to know after taking one look at the boy, anyway.”

“People see what they want to see. I’m sure if he attends as one of Arya’s companions, no one will pay him any attention at all.”

“There may actually be some truth to that, milord,” Marten said. “We know who he is, so his parentage is obvious to us. We may be crediting your followers with greater powers of perception than they in fact possess.”

“Or – ” Alyse shifted in her chair, wouldn’t meet Gendry’s eye. “Does he have to attend at all?”

“I won’t ask my son to hide away in my own house. I won’t. Besides, if we do that, Arya will refuse to come.” At Alyse’s affronted look, he said, “Not that I’m so desperate for her to be there, but her presence, at least, is already common knowledge, and her absence at the feast would be remarked upon.”

“How many of the household know who he is?” Alyse asked Marten.

“Hard to say, milady. There have certainly been rumors, but I believe that your reputation for respectability, milord, together with the outlandishness of the case, is working in your favor.”

“How do you mean?” Gendry asked.

“There are those among the household, particularly the younger ones, who refuse to believe the rumors because they don’t think you capable of such a thing.”

Unaccountably, this annoyed Gendry a great deal. “Gods, do my own staff find me that boring?”

“See! There’s no need to make an announcement yet,” Alyse said. “Please, not this soon. In a few weeks, maybe, you can send some ravens. Or do as Marten suggested and introduce him to a few trusted friends. I’m not asking you to deny him forever, just for a little while longer. Please.”

“There’s no need for you to beg, my love. This is your decision, as far as I’m concerned.” It was already obvious to Gendry that she was not going to relent, but he gave her a moment, anyway. “Very well. Eddard will attend the feast, but he won’t be introduced to anyone.” 

“And if someone asks who he is, milord? We’ll say he’s one of Arya’s crew members, perhaps?”

Gendry shook his head. “She won’t disclaim him. She’ll say he’s her son, and we’ll have to hope that anyone who hears it doesn’t have a very long memory for gossip. Or a pair of working eyes.” He looked skeptically at Marten, who shrugged, and at Alyse, who had resumed staring at the floor. He dismissed Alyse and tried to get back to work, without much success. Try as he might, for the rest of the morning he couldn’t shake his sense of foreboding.

~

A few hours before the guests were due to start arriving, Gendry left the council chambers and went up to the battlements to watch the ships come in from Tarth and Rain House and Griffin’s Roost. It was sure to be a large gathering, with representatives of all the major families in attendance, and quite a few of the minor ones, as well. He hadn’t been up there long when Arya joined him, leaning back against the wall next to him so that she was facing the interior of the tower. He wasn't sure how she'd found him; perhaps she'd also been desirous of fresh air. “Shireen was just showing me around the library,” she said. “She’s lovely.” 

“She’s had a busy morning.” 

“Hmm. You’ve become quite the family man,” she said, as if she were only just figuring this out.

“Well, we couldn’t all fuck off to the ends of the earth, Arya,” he said as mildly as he could. “Some of us had to stay here and rebuild.”

“What was that like?” she asked, seeming genuinely interested.

“What do you think? It was bloody hard. The kingdom was torn apart by war – the Stormlands wasn’t hit as badly as other places, but we still lost a lot of men. The local lordlings were all squabbling over who was to be Lord Paramount now that House Baratheon was dead and buried, when out of nowhere comes this unknown blacksmith claiming to be Robert Baratheon’s son with the wrong clothes and the wrong accent and a mere three dozen followers, most of them foreign. I thought about giving it all up and going back to the Street of Steel.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. Stubbornness, mostly. And I probably knew that the Street of Steel would be too small for me, after everything that had happened.” He looked over at her, watched her examine the heel of her boot with that preternatural stillness she still had. _You were part of that_ , he thought about saying, but he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

“I’ve had a raven from Sansa,” she said eventually. “She says that if I don’t leave for Winterfell within a week she’s going to come down here herself.”

“Just invited herself over, did she?”

“She is a Queen, Gendry. You can hardly say no.” He suspected that Arya had not kept abreast of Westerosi politics during her travels. She likely had no idea how much resentment existed in some of the kingdoms – Dorne and the Iron Islands, in particular – towards the Queen in the North over her bloodless secession from the realm. Although the idea of being King in the Stormlands still daunted him, Gendry thought that it would be best for everyone involved if the remaining six kingdoms were allowed to follow suit. Not wanting to be courted as a potential ally in armed rebellion by the Dornish or the Ironborn, he had only ever voiced this opinion to Marten and to his wife.

“Does she know about Eddard?” he asked.

“She will soon. The first thing she asked was why I came to Storm’s End before Winterfell. She phrased it a bit differently, though,” she said, looking displeased. Arya’s relationship with her sister had always been an obscure mystery to Gendry, and he wanted to keep it that way, so he left this alone. 

“I don’t think she’ll be very happy when she finds out you gave your father’s name to a bastard.”

She sighed. “I didn’t think that you of all people would be so bothered about that part.”

“Why not? I know what it’s like to be the bastard child of a highborn. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, let alone my own son.”

This seemed to trouble her, just for a moment. “Well, if Sansa thinks that our father would be unhappy that his grandson, and the grandson of his best friend, carries his name, then I’m afraid it’ll be a very short visit.”

“Is that a promise?” Gendry asked, making her smirk. Something else suddenly occurred to him. “Arya, did your brother – did King Bran know about Eddard this whole time?”

She shrugged. “I assume so. Bran knows everything.”

“He might have mentioned it,” Gendry grumbled. “You know, ‘Thank you for coming to the great council, Lord Baratheon, lovely weather we’ve been having. By the way, my sister is sailing around the edges of the known world with your son, having all kinds of adventures while you answer ravens about collapsing bridges and argue about the tax rate.’”

Arya seemed a bit saddened by this, which hadn’t been his intention, exactly. “I can’t tell if you’re still cross with me or if you’re joking.”

“Maybe a bit of both,” he said, smiling to take some of the sting out of it. “Give me time.”

“I suppose that’s the least I can do. Give you time, after I robbed you of so much of it.”

He looked at her, surprised. “Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t be soft."

After that, he didn’t see her again for another several hours, as he entered the Round Hall in advance of his guests’ arrival. The hall was aflutter with preparations for the feast, and Gendry regretted coming down so early even though he knew that his supervision would be required. He was surprised to find Arya already there; she was standing near the doorway and staring at him with more than her usual intensity, a half-smile playing about her lips. He looked down at himself, wondering if he’d forgotten to do up the laces on his boots. “What?”

“You clean up well,” she said.

This struck Gendry as odd; the outfit he’d elected to wear to the feast that day, which had little in the way of adornment apart from some embroidery around the shoulders that was supposed to resemble antlers, was hardly more formal than his day-to-day clothing. “When was the last time you saw me dirty?” he asked. She arched an eyebrow at him, and he could feel himself flushing, an unwelcome warmth spreading from the pit of his stomach. He had gone a very long time – years – without anybody looking at him like that; for it to finally be happening in the middle of the Round Hall with his servants swarming around him was deeply disconcerting. Not to mention that Alyse was surely somewhere nearby.

Luckily, Shireen chose that moment to race up to him to show off the new ribbons she’d sewn onto her feast gown. He seized upon the distraction, made all the appropriate noises of encouragement – although he had no head for fashion, and although he knew that it was probably below his station to concern himself with such fripperies, it made him happy to see her take such pride in her work. By the time Shireen skipped off again, Arya was gone, leaving nothing but a magnified sense of unease in her wake.

~

The feast began with food and toasts, as was custom. Afterwards, Gendry remained seated at the high table so that he might have a moment or two to himself before making the rounds of his vassals. He supposed that he might have actually enjoyed such a gathering had he not been expected to play the gracious host. As it was, he found the entire event an ordeal. He noticed a group of young men drinking and carrying on just in front of the door and considered asking Marten to go make sure that they weren’t getting into any mischief. Most of his vassals were decent enough men, but their children – in particular, their sons – made Gendry’s skin crawl. How he hated to watch them strut about with their spotless weapons and their unearned arrogance, spoilt little tossers who’d never seen real combat or even a single day’s hard work in their lives. He saw the way they looked at him sometimes, with a sneer and a whispered aside to their friends, _He used to be a blacksmith, you know, common as dirt, do you think he’s still got the soot under his nails?_ It sometimes made Gendry want to say: _By the time I was your age, I could armor a man fit to joust against any knight in the Seven Kingdoms. By the time I was but a few years older, I had fought against the army of the dead, and survived. What can you do, besides polish your sword?_ By far the most depressing part about it was the fact that one of those wastrels was likely to be Shireen’s husband one day.

Alyse was standing off to the side of the hall and talking to her cousin, the Lady Sibely; Gendry caught her eye and gave her a wan smile. Much to Gendry’s surprise, and relief, she seemed to have been correct in predicting that none of their guests would pay much attention to Eddard. Gendry could occasionally see him skulking around the back of the hall, looking wildly uncomfortable in a set of formal garb borrowed from one of the page boys. Arya, of course, had vanished from sight within seconds of being set upon by a knot of gossip-hungry feast-goers who naturally wanted to hear all about the famous Arya Stark’s circumnavigation of the known world. After their earlier exchange, he couldn’t pretend that it would be a wise idea for him to go looking for her, but it rankled him a bit that he had no idea where she was. He made it through a brief exchange of pleasantries with Ser Alesby, one of his landed knights, and a longer but no less distracted conversation with Lord Clydemarsh, before his curiosity got the better of him and he went off in search of her. 

He found her leaning against the wall at the shadowy edge of the hall, quaffing ale and looking around at the proceedings with disgust. Something about it made him think of her as she’d been when they’d first met, twelve years old and always scowling at something or other, and his heart swelled with a fondness that was so innocent and friendly that he didn’t think twice about approaching her. “You look like you’re enjoying this about as much as I am,” he said.

“Do you have to do this often? I’d kill myself.”

“Only a few times a year. You got lucky.”

She hadn’t bothered to change into finer clothes for the occasion, he noticed. The weather was still unaccountably mild, so she’d foregone with the cloak, and the vest she wore fit her snugly, as if it had been tailored for a woman’s body rather than a man’s. It was rather dim in this part of the hall – he suspected that was why Arya had retreated there – but he could still make out that gemstone on a chain that he had seen her wearing before. “What’s that?” he asked, motioning towards it. 

“Long story.” When Gendry made a disbelieving face at her, she smiled and continued, “When Eddard was eleven, we were charting a group of islands some thousand miles southeast of Asshai. These islands were inhabited, which wasn’t unusual in that area, but the people were quite small, and a bit sickly, and spoke a language that was much like the Common Tongue. We’re still not sure how they got there. It’s something I’d like to speak to a Maester about, actually. Anyway, there was an island at the very edge of the cluster that the inhabitants told us to avoid at all costs. They said that a sorcerer lived there, a mad sorcerer who would steal our most precious possessions. Well, we wanted to chart the entire group, so we ignored them. We sailed around the island and took notes on its features. There were no signs that anyone was living there at all, and we laughed about what the natives had told us. We couldn’t wait to go back and tell them that they had been mistaken. We were about to leave when we realized that Eddard was gone. He had simply vanished from the ship. So I went ashore and searched the island until, right at its center, I found the entrance to a cave.”

Arya paused, whether to fortify herself for what came next or to make sure she was right in the telling Gendry wasn’t sure. “The sorcerer was inside the cave, and he had Eddard trapped in a cage made of whale bones. Many years prior, he had cast a spell so that any time a ship came within a mile or so of the island, the thing onboard whose absence would cause the most sorrow disappeared from it and reappeared inside his cave. On our ship, that thing was Eddard.” Arya paused, and if Gendry hadn’t known better he would have sworn he saw her shudder. “The place was full of bones. There were hardly any valuable objects at all. Apparently it was people that would have been missed the most, almost every time.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said.

“No? It surprised me. Anyway, I asked him what he wanted, and he said that if I wanted to get Eddard back I would have to help him. He said that at the bottom of the sea there was a crack in the ocean floor, and a demon lived there that had stolen the source of his powers, a conch shell that, if you put your ear to it, could tell you all the history of the world and everything that would one day come to pass.”

“Did you help him find it?” Gendry asked.

“No,” she said. “I cut his throat and took Eddard back to the ship. I also took this.” She fingered the jewel, which glimmered in the torchlight. “It must have been very dear to someone, once.”

Gendry was speechless with wonder and admiration and something like gratitude. “It matches your eyes,” he observed, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Arya grinned lopsidedly. “It’s actually blue, like the ocean,” she said. “My eyes are gray.” _Doesn’t have to be the same color to match_ , he thought. 

“My love?” He whirled around at the sound of Alyse’s voice. She was standing some distance away, probably still wary of Arya’s company. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Lord Maren was asking after you.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” He looked back at Arya, who made a quizzical face at him but didn’t say anything, before joining his wife on her way back towards the high table. He wasn’t sure why he felt so guilty; yes, they’d been in a poorly-lit section of the hall, but it wasn’t as though they’d been doing anything untoward. 

“What were you talking about?” Alyse asked, shyly.

“Arya was just telling me a story from her travels.”

“Hmm. It looked interesting.”

Gendry coughed, uncomfortable. “Not really,” he said.

“Does she always wear men’s clothing?”

“As long as I’ve known her,” he said. He was grateful when Lord Maren and his brother fell upon him with tankards and well-wishes for the new season, cutting this conversation short. 

He kept Alyse by his side for the next hour, as his vassals grew more and more disorderly. The Round Hall, with its imposing pillars and fine stavework on the walls, was an odd setting for such a debauched event as the feast of spring always devolved into; even the guests who lived less than an hour’s ride away would end up staying the night. 

Gendry was about to suggest to Alyse that Shireen retire to her chambers for the evening when there was a sudden commotion from the back of the hall. “That beast put a knife to my throat!” he heard someone cry. The speaker was the sixteen-year-old son of one of his vassals – Lynton, he was pretty sure the boy was called – and the beast in question, as Gendry saw with dread, was Eddard. Three of Lynton’s friends had already started to drag him towards the high table. When they deposited him in front of Gendry, the boy stopped to dust off his shoulders but otherwise appeared quite unruffled. “Is this true?” Gendry asked him.

“Yes, milord,” he said.

“Why would you do that?”

“He called the Lady Shireen a slut,” Eddard said, quietly but matter-of-factly. “Milord.” 

A murmur spread around the hall, and there was an immediate outcry from Lynton and his friends, denials and protests; Gendry raised his hand to silence them. “Did he say anything else?” Gendry asked. There were, by his count, five young men willing to swear that Lynton hadn’t said anything of the sort, and providing further details would bolster Eddard’s position. 

“Nothing I care to repeat, milord.” From the way Eddard clenched his jaw, Gendry could guess at what else Lynton might have said. It wouldn’t do to show how angry he was; he looked over at the boy with his best attempt at impassivity.

“He’s lying,” said Lynton. “I would never, milord.” 

“Then why did he pull the knife on you?” Gendry asked. 

“I said that he stank of saltwater and fish, milord.”

The other young men immediately and all at once attested to the veracity of the claim. Gendry had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. 

“If I may, milord,” said Lynton’s father, who had been drinking heavily since the feast began. “Here we have a case of the word of five versus the word of one. One unknown, furthermore. Tell me, who is this boy? I’ve never seen him before.”

There was no way around it. Eddard would be in danger the moment the crowd’s attention dispersed; Lynton wouldn’t forget about this quickly, and neither would his friends. And that odious little shit had insulted Shireen. Gendry raised his hand and waited for the crowd to stop nattering before he announced, “This boy is my son. His name is Eddard Storm, and anyone who insults him or tries to harm him is not welcome in this house.”

“My name isn’t Storm, it’s St – ” Eddard started to protest during the shocked silence that followed this, but a look from Gendry cut him off. 

“Eddard, give me the knife.” After a moment’s pause, Eddard stepped forward, drawing the blade from the inside of his vest. “I’m sure you can defend yourself without it,” Gendry said once he was in earshot. Eddard nodded, surprised, and gave him the knife without complaint. “Lord Tarnley, please collect your son and leave Storm’s End at once. Your wife and daughters are welcome to stay.” Lynton’s father bowed his head in obeisance; before he turned away, Gendry beckoned him over and said, low enough that only he would be able to hear it, “You tell your son that if he talks about my daughter again I’ll send him to the wall with his balls around his neck.”

“Of course, milord,” said Lord Tarnley. Gendry barely noticed as he and his son fled the hall; he had more pressing concerns. He looked over at Alyse, who had taken Shireen off to the side and was too preoccupied with comforting her to pay him any attention. He hoped that she would understand why he’d done it; he thought that she probably would. 

Quickly, before he went over to join his wife and daughter, he scanned the room for Arya. He spotted her not far away from him, standing next to a pillar on the other side of the hall. She nodded at him, her face quite solemn but not unhappy, and then she walked over to where Eddard was standing on his own, half-encircled by a ring of gaping feast-goers. She tapped him on the arm, and the two of them walked out of the hall, into the warm spring night.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Gendry spends some time with his children and tries to avoid Arya, to varying degrees of success.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the UST chapter, y'all. Mmmmmm, UST. The best kind of... T.

By the end of the next day, word that Arya Stark had brought the Lord of the Stormlands’ bastard back with her from Essos had spread to every corner of the Six Kingdoms. No one acknowledged it – it wasn’t the sort of thing that one acknowledged in mixed company – but Gendry knew that everyone was talking about it. Whispering servants fell silent as he entered the room; the Septon and the master of kitchens no longer seemed able to look him in the eye; Alyse received a sudden influx of ravens from various friends and cousins. 

Let them talk, he thought. He didn’t care. But what did irk him, all the more so now that he had acknowledged Eddard as his son in front of his assembled followers, was that Eddard had been at Storm’s End for almost a week and yet Gendry still hadn’t had a proper conversation with the boy. 

A few days after the feast, Gendry left his council chambers in the middle of a meeting, hunted Eddard down, and ordered him to meet him at the castle gates the following morning. He had decided that they should go sailing. “You can show me how you’ve lived all this time, and I can show you Shipbreaker Bay.”

He needn’t have been so worried. The boy nodded assent, even smiled at him. “All right,” he said. 

The next day dawned clear and cloudless. Gendry was still a bit nervous as he and Eddard rode down to the harbor together and boarded Arya’s ship, which was still home to most of her crew; she’d let the cabin boys return home to Volantis. After helping set the sails, Eddard led Gendry down a narrow flight of stairs and into the hull of the ship, which consisted of a handful of rooms leading off a central corridor. The boy stuck his head into the first room on their right and said something in Valyrian; a small, portly man with ink-stained fingers appeared at the door. He seemed delighted to see Gendry, shook his hand while speaking rapidly with Eddard. “He’s apologizing for his poor Common,” Eddard said.

“Ned is like my son,” said the man, all without releasing Gendry’s hand. “So, it is an… honor to meet his real father.”

Gendry’s smile was wide and genuine. “The honor is all mine.”

More Valyrian followed this, with Eddard explaining that the man had to get back to work; he pumped Gendry’s hand a few more times for good measure. Before he went back into the room, he nodded at Gendry and made a grinning remark to Eddard. Somehow, without understanding a word of Valyrian, Gendry knew that he had just said, “He looks like you.”

“He seems nice,” said Gendry.

“Our navigator. He is.”

Eddard opened the door to their left, and Gendry followed him into a room that was barely bigger than the privy at Storm’s End. There was a window high up on the wall that let in a miniscule amount of light, and a crossbeam cut the room in half so that it was impossible to walk across it without ducking. In one corner Gendry spotted a tangle of rags; in another, what appeared to be a collection of knives and a fretted string instrument with a long, thin neck. The boy watched him expectantly; Gendry wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. 

“This is where I sleep,” Eddard said brightly. Indeed, if Gendry squinted, he thought he could make out some sort of pallet buried underneath the dirty clothing. “Well, when the weather is fine I usually sleep on deck, but. I’ve had my own quarters for a few years now.”

“Luxurious,” Gendry said. “I’m serious,” he added when the boy seemed to think he was mocking him. “I didn’t have a room to myself until I was much older than you are.”

On their way back to the deck, Eddard rapped the door at the end of the hallway with his knuckles and said, “Mother’s quarters.” Gendry had to resist the urge to have a peek inside, to catch a glimpse of how she’d been living these past years. 

Back on deck, they stood near the prow, so that Gendry had to duck from the occasional spray of sea foam. Already, the ship was moving so quickly that it seemed to him that the cliffs were sailing and they were the ones standing still. He heard Eddard clear his throat. “At the feast, you called me Eddard Storm,” he said. “That’s not my name.”

“I’m afraid it is. That’s the name for bastards here. High-born bastards, that is, whose fathers acknowledge them.”

The boy considered this. “Mother always said that my name was Eddard Stark.”

“It’s not. It can’t be, you can’t get your name from your mother. I’m sorry,” he added, not sure if this was the right thing to say. 

Thankfully, the boy merely shrugged. “That’s all right. I don't mind Storm.”

“It is one of the better bastard names. Much better than Sand. Or Flowers,” Gendry said, feeling absurdly proud of himself when the boy wrinkled his nose and laughed. 

“When I have my own ship, I can have a Storm banner made for it,” the boy said thoughtfully. “With a flash of lightning down the middle.”

 _You can’t do that; they’d eat you alive_ , Gendry thought. Then again, he supposed that if anyone could get away with something that bold, Arya Stark’s son was as likely a candidate as any. “You want to have your own ship one day?” he asked instead. Eddard immediately launched into a prolix description of the make and design that he favored; the boy wasn’t shy at all, it turned out, when the topic of conversation interested him. Gendry had no idea what he was talking about, half the time, but he didn’t much care. 

They were passing Durran’s Point by then, and Gendry pointed out some features of the castle that otherwise would have been unrecognizable from such an angle. They moved to the other side of the ship as it entered the Straits of Tarth, to get away from the spray and the better to be able to see the island. Gendry said, “I was born a bastard, too, you know. But my father didn’t know about me, so I didn’t have a name at all.”

Eddard frowned. “What do you mean, born a bastard? You’re either a bastard or you’re not.”

“I was declared legitimate. By a Queen.” When the boy continued to look at Gendry as if he were not of sound mind – it was unnerving, how much he reminded him of Arya when he did that – Gendry explained, “If a King or Queen says you’re trueborn, then you’re trueborn.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” the boy muttered. Gendry had to admit that he had a point. 

“Your mother didn’t tell you much about me, then?”

“She didn’t tell me much about anyone from Westeros, except her father.” He paused before asking, a bit hopefully, “Did you know him?”

“No,” Gendry said, not sure why he felt so wounded. “Well, I met him once. He came to my shop.”

“You had a shop?” Eddard asked, surprised.

“I worked at one. I was an armorer’s apprentice.”

“Just an apprentice?”

“No, I finished my training. Took a while, though. I went on a bit of a detour. That was how I met your mother, actually.”

The boy looked at Gendry blankly. “How?”

“On the detour! We were both on the run from the Lannisters, although I didn’t know it, at the time. Really, she didn’t tell you any of this?”

Eddard continued to stare at him until, quite suddenly, his face lit up with comprehension. “You’re Gendry? Her blacksmith friend?”

“Yes! Who did you think I was?”

Eddard shrugged. “I don’t know. Some Lord. You never said you were a blacksmith.”

“Yes I – I just told you that I was a blacksmith.”

“No, you said you were an armorer’s apprentice.”

“It’s the same – ” Gendry shook his head. “Let me make sure I understand, your mother did tell you about me – about her friend Gendry – but she didn’t tell you that I was your father or that I was made a Lord?”

Eddard at least had the grace to look a bit guilty, at this. “Yes?”

“Seven hells. That woman…” Eddard seemed slightly affronted, so Gendry added, “Please don’t take offense. I’m obviously very fond of her. Don’t understand her sometimes, but…” He trailed off, at a loss for words. “What I mean to say is, I very much wish that I had known about you sooner. And that you had known about me.”

There was a pause; for a moment, Gendry worried that he had said the wrong thing. Finally, Eddard said, “I did ask her about you. About my father, I mean. All she would say was that he was a good man and that he was back in Westeros.”

“That’s about the sum of it,” Gendry said wryly. 

“I would have come looking for you, eventually. I would have made her tell me who you were.” He didn’t seem to be looking for approval in saying this. He was merely stating facts. Gendry liked this; he liked Eddard generally, he realized. 

“I know how difficult it is to make your mother do anything,” he said, which made Eddard smile. “But I believe you.”

~

He had been trying to avoid Arya ever since the feast. Which had been difficult, as she seemed to be everywhere, in his mind’s eye most of all. The other day, Gendry had looked at her across the table at the evening meal and thought, completely unprompted, _That’s the mother of my child._ He had almost dropped his fork, so intense was the rush of loyalty and protectiveness that came over him at the thought. It was absurd; he owed that kind of sentiment to his wife, not to the woman who had abandoned him years ago to raise his son in secret; and Arya didn’t need anyone’s protection. It was humiliating to realize that he wanted to give it to her, anyway. 

But if he was honest with himself, what he wanted most of all was to fuck her senseless. Ever since the feast, what had been a worrisome but manageable attraction had blossomed into the kind of obsession that could start a war. Alone in his chambers, he’d wonder how her body must have changed since he’d last seen it, if she still smelled as intoxicating, if she would urge him inside her with the same eagerness, until he couldn’t take it anymore and slipped a hand into his smallclothes, his relief matched only by his shame. A hundred times a day he thought about it. He thought about it vaguely, in a way that left him woozily smiling and a bit cross-eyed, and in lavish detail, so that his ears burned red and his mouth formed a grim line of concentration. Poor Marten hardly knew what to make of it. 

“You seem distracted, milord,” he said, after having to redirect Gendry’s attention to the matter at hand for the umpteenth time that morning. Gendry stared back at him. Couldn’t any of them tell? “Is anything the matter?” 

Gendry wondered what Marten would say if he told him the truth. Marten was rarely shocked by anything; he’d probably tell him to spend more time with Alyse, or to take more exercise, or something equally sensible. “I’m sorry. I’m rather tired, is all,” he said, which was true enough.

Not knowing what else to do, he decided to take Marten’s imagined advice. The first part of it, anyway; he was avoiding the training pitch, because he often saw Arya there. That afternoon, he sought Alyse out in her chambers. They hadn’t spent much time together since the feast, but not out of any ill-will on her part. As he had expected, she fully understood his reasons for acknowledging Eddard, had even apologized for insisting that they try to keep the boy’s parentage a secret. She blamed herself for Shireen having been so publicly insulted; if Eddard’s relationship to the family had been more generally known, no one would have dared say such a thing in front of him. The incident had apparently convinced Alyse that Shireen’s behavior – more specifically, her flirtatiousness around certain boys – needed to be addressed. “People talk about her. They say…” She looked at him with eyes full of apology. “They say it’s no wonder that a bastard’s daughter should be so wanton with her affections.”

On a different day, Gendry might have taken this more seriously, but he was feeling defensive. “Her affections?” he said. “She’s a fifteen-year-old girl, not a Lysene courtesan. So she’s kissed a few servants, what of it?” 

“She shouldn’t be kissing anybody!” Alyse said. “Not until she’s wed. Which will never happen, if she develops a reputation.”

“Oh, she’ll be wed, all right. She may end up my sole heir, so someone’s going to want to marry her.”

“Yes, but we want someone good. Would you talk to her? Ask her to be more… ladylike?” 

This made Gendry laugh. “You want me to talk to her about being a lady? What makes you think I’m qualified?”

“She won’t listen to me. And she respects you more than she does me.” When Gendry scoffed at this, she said, “It’s true. Most young women have a difficult time with their mothers. I certainly did.”

“Most young women don’t have mothers as perfect as you are,” he said. He had been trying to make her smile, but she merely swatted him across the shoulder, told him to leave because she wanted to change for the evening meal. 

“I’m not allowed to watch my own wife get changed?” he asked as she shooed him out of the room. 

Gendry took Shireen aside after the meal. Initially, she seemed happy enough to spend some time with him, but she deflated when he broached the topic that Alyse had asked him to discuss with her. “Did Mother ask you to do this?” she asked glumly. 

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “We agree. We both want you to be more careful. You’re my daughter, my only trueborn child and heir. People are going to be watching you all the time, looking for anything that they can use to take you down a peg. They’ll make things up, if they have to.”

“You weren’t married, and you had a child,” she said, interrupting him. “That’s a lot worse than anything I’ve done.”

“Shireen!” he said, aghast. A different kind of father would have slapped her for impudence. “I was older than you are, and that kind of virtue is less important, if you’re a man. You know that.”

“Arya’s not a man.”

“Well, Arya’s different.”

“Then I want to be like Arya.”

Gendry sighed with frustration. He wasn’t sure why they were talking about Arya at all. “I really don’t think you do. Arya’s been alone these past eighteen years. Don’t you want to have a family someday?”

“She has a family. She has Eddard, and you’re still her friend.” _Friend._ That was one word for it.

“But she doesn’t have a house, and followers, and a title. You’re going to have all those things.” She shrugged, looked away from him as though she were bored. “Look, Shireen. I like to think I’m not the worst example for you to follow, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t made mistakes. What I did, with Arya, that was a mistake.” Gendry could not bring himself to say this with any conviction; he had always hated having to lie to people, which was unfortunate, because as a Lord he had to do it quite a lot. 

Shireen did not seem convinced. “So you’re saying you wish Eddard had never been born?” she asked.

“No, I never said that. I’m very glad that Eddard was born. That still doesn’t make it right.” 

“How could it be wrong, when I have a brother because of it?”

“Well, it upset your mother very much, for one thing.”

“She’s not really upset. She just acts upset because she thinks she’s supposed to be.” Gendry paused, wondering if there was any truth to this. Shireen was at a peculiar age, he thought. There were times when she still seemed mostly a child, but there were other times when she said such perceptive things that Gendry almost couldn’t believe she was his. 

“You must be very tired,” Gendry said. When she looked at him quizzically, he continued, “It’s exhausting, trying to prove everybody wrong all the time. I know because I used to do it myself. I became much happier when I stopped.”

She seemed about to protest. Then she said, “You’re wrong,” her mouth twisting up in a reluctant smile. Gendry laughed at her, thought about ruffling her hair. “All right. I’ll be more _care-ful,_ ” she said, drawing out the word mockingly. “Can I go to bed now?”

“Yes, you can. I’ve done my duty.”

“I knew it!” she said. “This was all Mother’s doing.”

~

As Gendry passed the library on his way to his chambers for the evening, still discomfited for reasons he could not identify by his conversation with Shireen, he heard Arya call his name. He hesitated for a moment before sticking his head into the library, where he found her sitting next to the fire with a bottle in her hand. “I took this from your stores,” she said, as he warily approached her. 

Gendry squinted at the label. “You drink rum?”

She lifted the bottle in toast. “Come, join me.”

Gendry was sick of avoiding her, and besides, she looked so lonely and small curled up in one of those armchairs built for a man twice her size. He pulled one of the chairs a bit further away from her and sat. She passed him the bottle. “I don’t really drink. Don’t want to get fat, like my father.”

She tilted her head. “I saw you drink ale at that feast the other night.”

“Barley water,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone. If my vassals found out, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Fuck your vassals. You really won’t drink with an old friend?” She continued to dandle the bottle at arm’s length, smiling in a way that she must have known would disarm him utterly. He slowly reached out and took the bottle from her, uncorked it and drank. The rum was scorching on his throat, but he managed to get it down without coughing. 

“I haven’t seen you in a few days,” she said. It was an uncharacteristic thing for her to say; he almost thought she sounded hurt. 

He shrugged. “Been busy.” He passed the bottle back to her. She put it down on the table between them and sighed, seemed to sink even further into the chair. The last time he’d seen her this relaxed had been – well, it had been a very long time ago. It wouldn’t do to dwell on those memories. And indeed, it was easy enough to remain in the present with her sitting right in front of him. Her face was the same strange amalgam of sharp angles and soft roundedness that it had always been, but her eyes were gentler, although that might just have been the rum. Tentatively, he allowed his gaze to drift downward, to the swell of her hips under her breeches and her small but soft-looking belly, her breasts as they rose and fell with her slow, subtle breaths. She was even more beautiful now than she had been when she was eighteen, he decided. And yet, miserable cretin that he was, all he could think about was her naked and spread-eagled, or naked and bent over, or naked and crouching on top of him. He averted his eyes, but it didn’t help much.

“Tell me, how often do you and Alyse sleep together?” she asked.

By that point, he should have known better than to be shocked by anything she said, but this took him by surprise. It was as if she could read his mind. “Excuse me?”

“A prostitute in Meereen once told me that however many years a couple has been wed, that’s how many weeks will go by without them lying together. I don’t know many married people. I was just wondering if it was true,” she said, looking at him thoughtfully. 

“What were you doing in a Meereenese brothel?”

“Never you mind. Seventeen weeks, that’s what, four months? Is that about right?”

“I don’t know, Arya,” he said. 

“How could you not – ”

“I don’t know because I don’t remember the last time.” He knew that this was a wildly inappropriate topic of conversation, particularly with her, but in all those years, he’d never had a chance to speak to anyone about his loneliness, his desire for closeness: all those feelings he had managed to suppress until the last week. It was almost a relief to tell someone.

“Oh.” She added, more quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “Marriage stops being about all that fairly quickly.”

“I wouldn’t know.” 

“You never came close?” he asked.

“No, never,” she said, as if it were a foregone conclusion. “I haven’t had a good roll in a long time, either. It’s not good to sleep with crew, muddies the chain of command, and crew is all the company I’ve had for the past year.” Why was she telling him this? She wasn’t trying to make him jealous; that wasn’t her way. Probably she was just bored. “What, do you know a good man for the job?” she asked, misunderstanding the look on his face. “Or woman, actually. I’ve never tried that, might be interesting. I think your master of stables would be up for it, but I prefer men with a little more meat on their bones, to be honest.”

“Please don’t sleep with Roy,” he said. “He’d probably want to compare notes.” He had never been able to joke with Alyse about this sort of thing. There was an ease and a comfort to it that he hadn’t even known he was missing. 

“And the honorable Lord Gendry Baratheon doesn’t tell tales,” she said, teasing him. She picked up the bottle of rum and passed it to him again, watched him take a reluctant drag. “Tell me, is Alyse really the only woman you’ve been with these last seventeen years?” Gendry was woefully disappointed in himself when he failed to train his features into an expression of impassivity. Arya’s eyes widened, and he thought she looked a bit vindicated. “Lord Gendry, you surprise me.”

“Please don’t call me that,” he said. “I go by Lord Baratheon, when I must. Makes it easier to pretend it’s someone else.”

“How many other women?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, as if it were up to him, as if she weren’t fully capable of wheedling the truth out of him, if she wanted to. _Four._

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Alyse is obviously very happy with you, and it’s ridiculous, asking a man to only be with one woman for decades. Would drive any man mad.”

“You might be right about that. Still, I took a vow,” he said. “Just because I’ve broken it before doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to keep it now.” And anyway, his last lapse had been almost ten years ago. He had as close to a clean conscience as he was likely to ever get again. 

“I respect that,” she said. _Do you?_ he thought, looking at her sidelong. They were silent for a while, passing the bottle back and forth. “You were a good first, you know,” she said eventually. “You were very sweet.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said, dryly.

“I didn’t expect you to be so sweet. I thought I wanted something rougher, but it was better your way. How many women can say they lay with the first boy they ever liked? Not many, I should think,” she said proudly.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I was hard up, probably would have gone to bed with a stuffed ham if it had looked at me right,” he said, making her laugh. 

“Tell me, did you miss me, after I left?” she asked.

“Of course I missed you, what a stupid question.”

She laughed again. “I’m asking if you ever thought about me when you wanked. I thought about you plenty.”

Gendry was fairly certain that she was mocking him, now, and he didn’t like it. He put the bottle down, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Arya, you’re drunk.”

“Only a little,” she said. “It’s all right, I know you did. The better question would be when did you stop.”

“That’s it, it’s time for you to go to bed,” he said, standing and offering her his arm. She stared up at him, still smiling as if they were both having a grand time. Gendry sighed. “I stopped a long time ago,” he said, and for some reason it didn’t feel like a lie. “It’s been eighteen years, Arya. It’s too late for this.”

“Too late for what?” she asked, the picture of innocence. 

“Come on, up you get.”

It wasn’t a long walk back to the guest quarters, but every step of it was a struggle not to lean into the warmth he could feel coming off her. She kept apologizing, which worried him, made him think that she knew how her presence affected him. When they reached her quarters, she hesitated for a moment after opening the door. He could see her bed from where he was standing; this was all highly improper. Why had he agreed to walk her to her chambers, and why hadn’t he already left her there? “Are you cross with me again?” she asked.

“No, but you need to go to bed.”

“Very well. Good night, old friend,” she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. This took his breath away; he stood there frozen as she entered the room and closed the door behind her; he suddenly felt as bereft as he would have if someone had come up behind him and cut off both of his arms. His lips were tingling from needing to kiss her back.

He made it back to his chambers, somehow. Once there, he thought about stumbling to his wife’s quarters – he was a little drunk, from the rum – but he couldn’t bring himself to do that, to force himself on her after such a long time with his head full of somebody else. He thought about using his hand on himself again, but he knew that it wouldn’t help. He felt feverish, hot all over and yet racked with shivers. There was nothing to do besides go to sleep, but he couldn’t sleep, so he lay there in the dark until the drink carried him blessedly off.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sansa and her brood arrive at Storm’s End, Eddard extends an invitation, Alyse notices something, and Arya plays hide and seek.

A week later, on a chilly and slightly overcast day that presaged the imminent arrival of the spring storms, a party from Storm’s End made the winding and treacherous journey on horseback down the edges of the cliffs to the coastline. The Queen in the North, the Prince Consort, their children, and a small company of servants and retainers had sailed from White Harbor a few days prior and were now about to dock at the harbor. 

The last time Gendry had been here had been the first time he had met Eddard. How much could change in the space of a few weeks, he thought as he watched Arya, who was not visibly affected by the prospect of seeing her sister again but who nevertheless had dressed in slightly finer clothes than usual, and his son wait at the edge of the dock for the Queen’s arrival. 

Sansa greeted her sister with a hug, which surprised Gendry, but then immediately seemed to berate her about something, which did not. He couldn’t see Arya’s face, but he could tell from the rigid line of her back that she was not standing down. He looked at his wife to see if she had noticed any of this, but Alyse was otherwise occupied, making sure that Shireen’s gown was properly fastened in the back. Shireen was much less enthusiastic about riding down to the harbor to greet the Queen in the North and her family than she had been about meeting Arya Stark and was currently whining at Alyse to leave her and her gown alone. At a sharp look from Gendry, she stood up straight and submitted to her mother’s ministrations.

Arya presented Eddard to his aunt, who looked him up and down appraisingly; Gendry felt a reflexive twinge of defensiveness, at this. She said a few words to him, and his reply must have met with her approval, because she nodded before sweeping past him to where Gendry and his family stood waiting to receive her.

The years hadn’t changed her much. She was still good-looking, although Gendry had always found there to be something rather remote and inaccessible about her beauty. Despite having borne three children – and three stillbirths, if the rumors were to be believed – she was only slightly less slender than she had been the last time he’d seen her. “Lord Gendry,” she said in greeting. “I didn’t expect I would ever see you again, much less under these circumstances.”

Gendry wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Welcome to Storm’s End, your grace. This is my wife, the Lady Alyse. My daughter, Shireen.”

“It is our great honor to host you, your grace,” Alyse said, nodding her head.

“It is beautiful country here,” the Queen said, smiling in that guarded way that she had. “A bit forbidding, perhaps.” 

“That’s saying something, coming from a Northerner,” Gendry remarked.

Sansa turned to him and said, “The North isn’t forbidding at all if you know how to live there. Whereas I understand we’ll have to ride for over an hour to even get to your castle from the harbor?”

“That is true enough, your grace.” 

As the Queen brushed past him on her way to the horses, Alyse caught his eye and hissed, “Don’t insult her.” 

“I think I already have,” he said. He knew from Arya that Sansa wasn’t thrilled about having to make the trip to Storm’s End to see her; furthermore, he couldn’t imagine that the Queen in the North would ever harbor warm feelings towards a man who had sired a bastard on her sister.

It was time for the evening meal by the time they made it back to the castle. They ate in the Round Hall, which was far too large a venue for their small party but the only appropriate one at Storm’s End for welcoming royalty. Sansa had agreed to dispense with the high table for the occasion, seeing as they were so few and she wished to be able to talk to her sister, so they all sat together on the lower level. 

Queen Sansa had named her eldest Eddard as a matter of course and probably would have done so even had she known that Arya had already taken the name. Fortunately, among his family the prince still went by Ned, which prevented some confusion at the table. He had a quiet, observant air about him which Gendry approved of, much in contrast with his boisterous younger brother. Gendry spent most of the meal in conversation with their father, the Prince Consort. He was older than Gendry would have expected – ten years older than the Queen, at least – but quite an impressive and erudite man, nevertheless. He was from some minor Northern house, Gendry gathered, and had very nearly become a Maester before his elder brother’s death during the war had compelled him take up his familial duties.

At one point after the food had been cleared away and the group had broken up into a half-dozen private conversations, Gendry saw Eddard standing off to the side of the hall by himself. He greeted him and asked, “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Yes, milord,” Eddard said, standing respectfully to attention. 

“You don’t have to address me like that that when it’s just the two of us talking,” Gendry said, a bit sadly. 

“Even here?”

“Even here.”

Eddard leaned towards him and said, with a slightly conspiratorial air, “I don’t really know the rules.” 

“You’re lucky you grew up in a place where they didn’t much matter,” Gendry said.

“We did have rules, on the ship,” Eddard said. “But our rules actually made sense.”

Gendry remembered having felt much the same way when he first arrived at Storm’s End. The age- and experience-based hierarchies of the smithy, which he had occasionally chafed at as an apprentice, had seemed blessedly logical and practical when compared to the new world he found himself in. He doubted very much that Eddard would want to hear such reminiscing from an old man, however. “How do you find your cousins?” Gendry asked.

Eddard considered this. “They’re very… green,” he said. 

“I suppose to someone who has seen so much of the world, a bunch of Westerosi princes and princesses must seem very silly.”

Eddard shrugged. “They’re not silly, they just… They don’t know anything,” he said. “Princess Catelyn thought that the Summer Isles was where the sun goes during the winter.”

“You’d best not tell the Princess too much about the Summer Isles, now. Don’t want to scandalize your aunt. How long were you there?”

“Two years. We were trading in silks and spices, at the time. I got to sail a swan ship back and forth between Tall Trees Town and Volantis,” Eddard said, smiling at some memory. 

“I’d love to see it. I’ve never left Westeros, you know.” 

“I’ll take you, when I have my ship.”

Gendry hadn’t expected this. He was touched beyond measure but afraid to show it. “I get seasick, you know. Sailing around Shipbreaker Bay in calm weather is fine, but on the open ocean I’m hopeless.” This was true enough. The voyage from Dragonstone to Eastwatch with the Dragon Queen’s company, which was the first and only real seafaring he’d ever had to do in his life, had been two days of sheer misery.

“Loads of people do, at first. You get used to it.”

Gendry couldn’t bring himself to turn down such an open-hearted overture, couldn’t even bring himself to admit that it would probably never happen, even though the idea of a Lord of the Six Kingdoms sailing off into the Sunset Sea with his bastard son was fanciful enough to bring a smile to his face. “Then I shall go with you,” he said. 

Gendry was thinking about all of this, later, when the Queen strolled up to him. They stood side by side for a moment and watched their children interact; Eddard had taken two apples from the table and was using them to teach Price Robb how to juggle, and Shireen was listening with rapt attention as Prince Ned told her about the Winterfell crypts. Sansa said, “Your wife is dealing with all of this very well. My mother never let Jon sit at the table with company.”

“She’s a very generous woman, my Alyse. And it helps that you’re here,” he admitted. Sansa nodded graciously. “I wanted to thank you for agreeing to come here, actually. I’ve been grateful for the chance to get to know my son.”

“You’re mistaken if you think I agreed to anything. I begged her to come north immediately, but Arya insisted that she would stay here for at least a month. She’s too stubborn to admit it, but I think she must feel some real contrition about what she did.”

Gendry shrugged. “I understand it,” he said, surprising himself, but it felt true enough.

“You do?” Sansa asked him, clearly skeptical.

“She needed to leave. So, she left. Don’t see what’s so complicated about it.”

“And how many people did she hurt by leaving? By never writing, even when she could have? And what of that boy over there she condemned to be raised as a bastard because she was too pig-headed to come home and marry his father? Is that all to be forgiven simply because she _needed to leave_?” She paused, regarding him with a strange mixture of curiosity and disappointment, before adding, “Sometimes I think I understand what she sees in you, but you always ruin it.” 

Gendry laughed at this, until he realized that she was completely serious. “I’m sorry if I’ve given you offense, your–”

“If our father had still been alive he would have flogged you to within an inch of your life, you know that? King Robert’s son or not,” she said. 

He had wondered if she might bring this up. “If your father had still been alive, Arya and I would have never met.” Gendry imagined it wouldn’t help his case to say what he was really thinking, which was: but she seduced _me_.

“You miss my point. I know that my sister is different. I accepted that a long time ago. But the rest of us aren’t as lucky as her. We don’t get to just do whatever we want and damn the consequences. And nor should she, even though she somehow manages to get away with it. I would have thought that you of all people would understand that.”

“I do,” he said gravely. “I understand it very well.”

“Good. Now, I’m going to go say a few words to your poor wife over there. Have a good evening, Lord Gendry.”

After he’d had a moment to himself to think about what she’d said, Gendry decided that the Queen’s characterization of her sister’s behavior had been grossly unfair. The war had left its mark on all of them, Arya perhaps more than anyone, and who was Sansa to cast aspersions on her manner of coping with the horror and anguish she’d been through? Would any of them even still be here, if it weren’t for Arya? Hadn’t she been the one to save them all? Gendry fumed, wishing for a quicker tongue, and nursed his barley water by himself as the party carried on around him.

Whenever he and Arya were in the same room, he found that he couldn’t help but constantly monitor her position. If she was in his line of vision, it took a real effort of will to look at her directly, so wary was he of making a fool of himself by staring at her too openly; but if she was behind him, he often had to stop himself from turning his head to make sure that she was still where he thought she was. The only fortunate thing about the whole vexing process was that, when she made her way over to where he was standing, he had slightly more time to prepare himself than he would have otherwise. “How is it, seeing your sister after all this time?” he asked.

Arya shrugged. “She hasn’t changed.”

“I don’t think she likes me very much.”

“No one ever thinks that Sansa likes them,” she said. “She doesn’t mind you. I’d know if she did.”

“Well. I’m honored.” They stood there in precarious silence for a moment. She must have had a bath that day; her hair was still a little damp, and the skin just south of her collarbone looked particularly soft and inviting. She caught him staring but seemed to think nothing of it.

“When she and her family go back home in a few weeks’ time, I’m going to go with them. I want Eddard to see Winterfell.”

“Fine,” Gendry said automatically. “That’s fine.” The thought of her leaving – of Eddard leaving, too, but mostly her – was immensely dispiriting. Was it because he had been rather chilly towards her since their conversation in the library? He cursed his inability to school his emotions better, even though he knew that it was probably for the best that she left. 

“Even when he was Hand of the King, I don’t think my father was ever as busy as you seem to be,” she said disapprovingly. 

Unsure of what she was getting at, Gendry muttered, “Your father probably didn’t need half an hour to read a ten-inch scroll.”

“I’d like to see more of you before I go,” she said, interrupting him. He expected her to follow this up with something sarcastic and cutting, but she merely waited for his reaction. 

“You would?” he asked, hating the hopeful lilt in his voice.

“Of course I would. I sailed all the way around the world to see you, didn’t I?” she said, teasing.

All at once his misgivings vanished. “After everyone has gone up, I’ll be training.”

“Good,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You could use it.” 

“Calling me fat?” he asked as she walked away from him, back to where her sister was watching the two of them inscrutably. The seven help him, but he felt happier than he had in days.

When he returned to the table, Alyse was looking at him a bit strangely. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said, smiling. 

Alyse smiled back at him, although she still seemed slightly puzzled. “I never imagined we would eat side by side with a Queen in this room,” she said. 

“I’m sorry it had to happen this way.”

“I know,” she said wistfully. “I know.” He patted her on the hand, and they sat there in silence until it was time for their guests to retire.

~

The sun had set by the time he made it out to the training yard, and despite the torches he lit it remained quite dim. Too dim to train, if he was honest, but he had told Arya that he would be there. A peculiar mood came over him as he waited for her. He knew that he ought to be ashamed of himself for entertaining such a silly and idle infatuation, and that nothing could come of it besides, and yet his stomach turned over with happy anticipation every time he remembered that he was going to see her again soon, and alone. Before long, the vacillation between these warring states of mind had left him quite irritable. 

He was practicing his forward lunge when out of the corner of his eye he saw her saunter up to the yard and lean against one of the posts encircling it. “How’s my footwork?” he asked, maintaining his focus on the imagined target in front of him.

“Not bad. Your left leg drags a little.” 

“I know,” he said, gritting his teeth. 

“You’re the one who asked.” 

He restrained himself from looking for her when she vanished for a moment. Let her flit around like a moth if she wanted to, he thought; he didn’t care. But then she reappeared in front of him with a sword in her hand. Gendry fell into a stance as naturally as if he had been expecting this all along, and she followed suit. 

“You looked like you could use someone,” she said.

He started with an aggressive and obvious pass forward, which she easily deflected. “I thought you didn’t fight anymore,” he said.

She circled him, not attacking. “This isn’t fighting.” He lunged at her, clumsily and with too much forward momentum, and oddly enough he felt quite pleased when she managed a retreat. 

He could tell that she was out of practice. She handled the sword well, but her movements were halting, less fluid than they should have been. He shed two of her strikes and drove her into a corner, where she threw him off balance before sneaking around him and almost landing a blow on his exposed ribcage. He was stronger, and in better training, but she had agility and speed on her side. Also cunning, he thought as she predicted when he would pass forward, when he would fall back, and when he would pivot. If he could only prevent her from taking advantage of one of his weak spots, he might stand a chance. As he thought this, she landed a blow on his thigh that made him glad that they were only using training swords. 

Invigorated, he charged at her without bothering to modulate his strength, so that she could do very little besides deflect. Soon enough he had her trapped in a clinch, backed up against one of the posts at the edge of the yard. “We’re well matched,” he said.

“Perhaps.” With a final push, she caused him to overbalance again and touched the tip of her sword to his chest. This close, he could see the way her eyes blazed in combat, and he wondered, not for the first time, why she had supposedly given it all up. “But I win if you can’t catch me,” she said before darting away from him and into the darkness along the periphery of the yard. Without thinking, Gendry cast his sword aside and followed her.

She seemed to have gone into the storeroom that had formerly been his forge. It was not a large area, but it had been such a long time since he’d been there that he couldn’t quite remember its layout. He nearly tripped over a quiver of arrows as he entered the room, and he had to stop for a moment so that his eyes could adjust to the darkness. He thought that he might have heard the shuffle of a footstep over to his right, but when he tried to follow it, even he could tell how ineffectual his best attempts at stealth would be. 

“What is this place?” he heard her say. He cursed, his head turning in the direction her voice had come from, but it was no use. She was already somewhere else. 

This went on for some time: he would stumble around in the silence, peering into the gloom and listening in vain for some sound that would give away her whereabouts, while she feinted and created distractions. He was growing more and more annoyed, imagining the talking-to he would give her when he eventually found her. “Arya, just come out. You win,” he said at one point. But then she overturned an archery target, which made an enormous clatter that reverberated throughout the room, and he took off in the opposite direction, in thrall to the hunt once again. He almost caught her, that time; he could feel the fabric of her vest slipping through his fingers as he reached out into the darkness. 

Excited by this near miss, he failed to predict the position of the furnace in front of him. He yelped when he stubbed his toe on it, hopped around on one foot for a while as the pain crested. Afterwards, he stood completely still and listened as intently as he could while still being a little out of breath. He heard nothing. For a moment, he wondered if she had slipped out of the room and left him there alone.

He heard a rustling noise to his left, and suddenly she was in front of him. “You’re very bad at this,” she said as he grabbed her by the shoulders. His irritation dissipated in an instant, replaced by a relief so strong that it felt a lot like joy. 

“I caught you,” he said, still holding her, both of them laughing like children. 

“Only because I let you.” 

There was no moment when he decided to kiss her. It simply happened, a natural consequence of her closeness. He looked into her eyes afterwards to gauge her reaction and found nothing there to stop him from kissing her again. 

Her mouth under his was soft and pliant, and at first she seemed a bit tentative, or possibly just surprised. But when she reached up to put her hands on his neck, her touch was like the lighting of a fuse. The pleasure that flooded his body came mingled with a desire so sharp it was almost painful; he moaned with it as he gathered her into his arms and pulled her flush against him. The kiss slowed down, so that every drag of her lips across his sent a thrum of pleasure straight down to his groin. She nibbled a little on his lower lip, and they broke away to stare at each other, breathing heavily. Even in this lighting he could tell that her eyes were blown out with lust. When he involuntarily moved his hips against hers, she whined a little, an astonished smile ghosting across her face. 

Once he had her pressed up against the wall, laughing at himself as he tried to kiss her and undo her belt and undo his, all at once, she suddenly broke away from him and said, “I don’t want you to hate me again.”

“I could never hate you,” he said, his voice so small and soft that he almost didn’t recognize it. 

“You might be angry with me, though.” He smiled and kissed her again to soothe this fear away. She hummed in appreciation, her tongue venturing out to taste the inside of his mouth, but then she pushed him away from her. “Stop. You’re not thinking. Think of your wife.”

Gendry stepped back. Alyse seemed very far away right now; it was hard to bring her to mind at all. And anyway, he couldn’t imagine anyone objecting to what he and Arya had just been doing, not when it had felt so right. 

She was already brushing herself off and straightening her clothes, as if she was planning to leave. He could feel himself start to panic. “Please, don’t go,” he said, not wanting to force himself on her when she’d told him to stop but so anxious for more of her that not pressing her back against the wall took every ounce of his will.

“You’ll thank me for stopping this, later,” she said. 

After she had gone, Gendry remained there for some time, his heart pounding and his breath uneven. The sorrow and confusion he felt at her sudden absence stayed with him for a while but was eventually replaced, as his head cleared and he realized what he’d been about to do, by dread. _Think of your wife._ Arya had been wrong. After everything, he wasn’t angry with her. He was only angry with himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter six is going to be long, and I have some pretty intense RL stuff coming up (nothing bad, just time-consuming), so I might take a little longer than usual to update. Hopefully not, though!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Gendry finally, FINALLY catches a lucky break.

The next morning, Gendry stayed in bed far later than he was accustomed to, staring at the ceiling and wondering how he could possibly get himself out of this mess. The times he’d strayed from the marriage bed before had all been passing fancies, not worth bothering his wife about. This was different. He felt a strong impulse to confess to Alyse immediately, but if he did that, she would be put in the position of having to interact with Arya in front of their guests and pretend that nothing was amiss. On balance, it seemed kinder to wait until after the Starks had departed for Winterfell before telling her, however uncomfortable it would be for him to hold his tongue in the meantime. 

He thought about this, but at other times he remembered what it had been like to kiss Arya, imagined what might have happened if she hadn’t put a stop to it, and the guilt would start all over again. 

Gendry skipped breakfast – he wasn’t hungry, anyway – and wandered down the corridor towards his council chambers, too despondent to worry much about whom he might run into. Hearing noise out in the yard, he walked onto a balcony and saw that Roy’s eldest, a bright young lad of twelve, was teaching Prince Ned to ride in the Dothraki fashion, as Eddard and Shireen watched and laughed from the sidelines. It soothed his heavy heart to see his children so happy. Shireen shouted something about how she could do it better; Ned took the challenge, dismounting so that she could take his place on the courser. Shireen didn’t much resemble her father, or anyone in Alyse’s family, but the older she grew, the more she put Gendry in mind of his memories of his mother. It made him smile sometimes, and it made him feel proud, to see the face of a Flea Bottom tavern wench haunting the ancient halls of the Storm Kings. 

He turned to see that Sansa had come up to join him on the balcony. “Your daughter is very spirited,” she said.

Gendry chuckled. “Any advice on that?”

“No. We like spirited women in the North. Speaking of which, have you seen my sister? She’s been making herself scarce all morning.”

Sansa left him to go look for her. Down in the yard, Eddard was taking his turn on the horse; he appeared to be a natural, although it was certainly possible that he’d already tried his hand at similar methods of riding during his travels. Gendry nodded at him, and he waved back, smiling proudly. How he’d ever thought the boy unfriendly and disagreeable, Gendry had no idea. 

Returning indoors, he was unpleasantly surprised to find Arya and his wife sitting together in an alcove just off the main corridor. When Alyse saw him, she greeted him and said, “Arya just gave me an apology.” 

Gendry froze. If Arya had breathed a word of what had happened the previous night, surely Alyse wouldn’t be sitting there in front of them so calmly. And yet he couldn’t think of anything else for which Arya needed to render an apology. “For bringing Eddard to the harbor without a word of warning,” Alyse said, her eyes hardening. 

“Of course,” Gendry said. Arya, at least, had remained completely impassive throughout the exchange, was looking back and forth between Gendry and his wife with impressive calmness. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“So was I,” Alyse said, offering Arya an only somewhat brittle smile. When she stood, Arya did, as well. “I’ll leave you two, then. I have to send a raven,” she said before she swiftly withdrew down the corridor. 

He and Arya stood there, barely looking at each other. “She’s a good woman,” Arya said. “I can see why you married her.”

“She is.” He chanced a glance in her direction. Did she look a bit haggard, or was it only his imagination? Either way, he couldn’t stand to be in her presence much longer. “Your sister was looking for you,” he said, gesturing towards the yard. “A minute ago, she asked if I’d seen you.” 

“I’ll go find her, then,” she said after a pause, leaving him with the sense that he owed her an apology, as well. But it was too late for that; she was already gone. 

~

Later that day, as the evening meal was about to be served, Marten appeared in the hall to say that Lady Alyse would not be joining them; she had been summoned by her father on urgent business to Tarth and would likely be there for some days. The Queen expressed the hope that nothing was wrong and asked him to send their regards. 

Disturbed, Gendry took Marten aside; before he could ask what had happened, Marten said, “Milord, the Lady Alyse bid me tell you… Her father did not summon her to Tarth. She went of her own accord. She said that you would know why,” he added.

His stomach dropped. “I must go after her. Please have Stepan meet me at the – ”

“It’s too late for that, milord,” Marten said, seeming surprised that he had to explain this at all. “There won’t be any ships. You shall have to wait until tomorrow.”

~

The next morning, on the ship, Gendry looked out at the clouds amassing over Shipbreaker Bay and thought about the time seventeen years prior when he’d made this same journey in order to ask for Alyse’s hand in marriage. After all the violence and struggle and disappointment he’d experienced during the war, her kindness and warmth had seemed like exactly the thing he needed to steady him through the years to come. Now, he had the feeling that he had proven himself unworthy of such goodness and would have to go without it forever. 

It was past noon when he arrived at Alyse’s family home, a leaky old stone fortress at the northern tip of the island. A servant brought him to the hall, where he found Lord Tarth sitting by the fire with a book in his hand and Alyse’s sister, the Lady Elayne, picking at the remnants of her afternoon meal. 

“Lord Gendry, is that you?” said Alyse’s father, squinting. His eyesight, never very strong to begin with, had only worsened with age. 

“Good afternoon, Lord Tarth. Elayne,” he nodded. She ignored him. 

“I’m surprised to see you here. Are you staying the night? They say it is going to rain.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I need to speak to Alyse.”

“Oh, well, surely you see Alyse every day, I would have thought you didn’t need anything with her so urgently. Say, is it true that the Queen in the North is staying at Storm’s End? I had a raven to that effect. Or was it the Prince of Dorne? Very nice man, I met him once, you know.”

Gendry looked to Elayne for help, but she merely glared at him and continued to hack at her pie. “I’ll pass along your regards. Is Alyse in her chambers?” he tried.

Lord Tarth sighed as if gravely disappointed. “She was out in the garden, last I saw. She’ll soak her gown, if she’s not careful.”

“I’m sorry for rushing through, but I really do need to speak to her,” Gendry said. Lord Tarth waved him by. 

Gendry found his wife sitting on a bench in front of a withered rose bush, staring up at the clouds with a faint half-smile on her face. He was pleased not to find her weeping; when she saw him she crossed her arms and said, her tone lightly mocking, “I thought you’d probably come after me. Even if it meant leaving her for a while.”

This stung, but it was the least of what he deserved. “Hello, Alyse,” he said sadly. He paused for a moment, not sure where to start. “How did you know?”

“What exactly am I supposed to know, Gendry?” When he looked at her helplessly, she sighed and continued, “After the meal, on the day the Queen arrived, I saw you look at her as if…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was a look I haven’t seen on your face in a very long time. Perhaps ever. That night, I went looking for you in your chambers, and you weren’t there. So I went to her chambers and found that she wasn’t there, either. Your behavior the next morning confirmed my suspicions.”

Anxious to correct any false conclusions she might have drawn, Gendry said, “I haven’t lain with her. But that night, there was a… kiss. I was going to tell you about it after she left.”

“What manner of kiss?” she asked. Gendry looked away from her. “Oh. I see.”

“Arya was actually the one who put a stop to it,” he said shamefacedly. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Clearly,” she said. “Do you want to have our marriage annulled?”

The very question horrified him. She was a good companion, a good mother to his daughter, and the scandal that would ensue as a result of their separation would make Eddard’s arrival pale in comparison. “Absolutely not.”

“Good. Neither do I. And yet I don’t satisfy you. If I’m honest, you don’t satisfy me, either.” She stood and walked towards the path that led out of the little clearing and into the main part of the garden. Intrigued, Gendry cast a doubtful look at the clouds above them before following her. 

They strolled a ways out into the fallow flowerbeds, past a lichen-covered fountain and another withered rose hedge. “Let’s not lie to each other anymore. Finding out about Eddard was a shock,” she said. It was the first time Gendry could remember her having said his son’s name out loud in front of him. “But sometimes a shock can be a good thing. This one made me realize that I’d been deluding myself about certain things.”

“Please, go on,” he said.

She walked carefully along the garden path, her hands clasped behind her and her face bent towards the ground. Her motions, and her speech, were very controlled, as though she had rehearsed them. He supposed that she probably had. “When I saw the way you looked at her the other night,” she said. “At first, I thought it made me jealous. But after I thought about it a while I realized, it wasn’t jealousy I felt, it was envy.” Gendry didn’t fully grasp her meaning. “I wasn’t jealous that you were looking at someone other than me. I was envious that you felt that way about someone, when I’ve never felt that way about anyone.”

“Not even me, in the early days?” he asked. He wasn’t hurt, exactly, but it was a humbling surprise, nevertheless.

“Maybe a little. But it faded very quickly. Tell me, how long has it been since you desired me like that? Did you ever?”

Gendry had to think about this. He wanted to give her a serious answer, but his memories were so worn-down and inconclusive that all he could offer was, “I don’t know. It was different, with you. I needed a wife, and I liked you better than your competitors, and… Davos said that I would come to love you, with time. And I did.”

“As one loves a friend.”

“Well, yes, I suppose,” he said. In truth, he’d never given the topic much thought. “That’s a kind of love, though, isn’t it? After seventeen years, I’d like to think that’s the more important kind.”

She stopped and turned to face him. “You were right. Let’s leave the talk of love to the poets. We are ordinary people, and must be practical.” Gendry thought nothing about his current walk of life particularly ordinary, but he held his tongue. “What is she to you? Be honest.”

Gendry sighed. “Complete honesty? Even if it pains you?” Alyse nodded. “She’s my oldest friend, and I admire her, a lot, and I don’t think there’s anyone I like talking to more, and she makes me feel young again. By which I mean she drives me completely mad,” he said.

“And you wish to lie with her?”

“I do. Since she got here there are times when it’s all I can think about.” Alyse looked away. He could tell that this had wounded her, but he could also tell that she didn’t want to show it. “I’m sorry.”

She lifted her head, steely-eyed once again. “My handmaiden tried to warn me about you when we were first wed. She said, ‘He’s a Baratheon, which means all his brains live between his legs.’ At the time, naïve child that I was, I thought she meant that you were a fool.”

He shrugged. “I might be that, too.”

“Not usually,” she said. “Where Arya Stark is concerned, yes, you seem to be.” He kicked at the ground, not wanting to admit the truth in this. “Has it been very difficult for you these past weeks? Having her there, but not being able to be with her?”

“It’s been torture,” he said.

For the first time that day, she seemed amused. “I’m not sure whether to be annoyed with you or to be rather touched that you went through all that for my sake when we haven’t lain together in almost three years.”

“Seven hells, has it really been that long?”

“It has.” 

“I didn’t know you were keeping track,” he said, a little embarrassed. 

“You’re not the only one with such desires. Even if they don’t lie in your direction,” she added offhandedly. 

They seemed to have reached an impasse. Gendry realized that, for all that they had talked, he seemed to be no closer to earning her forgiveness. “I came after you as soon as I could, Alyse,” he said. “I need you at Storm’s End. Shireen needs you. What do you want me to do?” he asked. 

She regarded him calmly. “I asked my sister for advice, you know. She told me to forbid you from ever seeing her again. You would probably do it, if I asked. I do still believe you honorable enough. But if I did that, instead of a husband who loves me like a friend, I’d have a husband who would come to hate me. Don’t deny it,” she added when he tried to interject. “Of course, I could simply ask you to continue to torture yourself for me. That’s probably what most women would do.” She paused, smiled with a kind of rueful irony. “But what kind of a friend would I be if I did that?”

She started to walk back towards the house. Gendry was sure that he hadn’t understood her correctly. It had sounded like she was about to give him permission, but that couldn’t be. And yet her whole demeanor had changed; she seemed more relaxed, was looking even at the barren landscape around them with enjoyment. The thick cover of clouds hadn’t lightened a bit, but he had the feeling that something in the air had changed. He followed her and waited for her to speak again. 

Eventually she said, “This is what I suggest. What you do in your bed is no longer any of my concern. But you must be discreet. If there is any gossip, I won’t be so forgiving anymore. In exchange, I will also be free to pursue my own happiness with whomever I choose.”

This last part made him a bit uncomfortable, but he recognized that for the rank hypocrisy that it was. “Did you have anyone in mind?” he asked, still reeling from the implications of what she was proposing.

“Not right now. But in the past, there have been… people,” she said, reddening. “Since we’re being so honest, I might as well tell you that they were both women.”

He stopped in his tracks. He had sometimes wondered at her total lack of interest in sharing his bed; Gendry was not a vain man, but enough women – men, too, on occasion – had given him second and third glances in his lifetime to convince him that he probably wasn’t completely repulsive. This explanation had never once occurred to him. “I had no idea,” he said.

“I barely knew, myself, until a few years ago.”

They had returned to the bench in front of the rosebushes, which he realized now weren’t withered at all. Amid the criss-crossing stems and the thorns, one could make out little pinpricks of green, buds that would bloom later in the spring. “So, you’re giving me permission?” 

“I am. But again, no one must know of this,” Alyse said “I won’t have Shireen’s prospects jeopardized because of our inclinations.”

“The Kingslayer and his sister were carrying on for years without anyone knowing about it,” Gendry said. 

Alyse sat back down on the bench, smoothing out her gown. “They were. And I believe many couples in our position have a similar understanding.”

“Never thought that I would be a part of one,” Gendry said.

“I don’t think it’s the sort of thing one generally plans for.”

He got down on his knees in front of her, rested his head in her lap. He felt her run her hands through his hair, soothingly, as a mother might do to a distraught child. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. “People get what they deserve. I truly believe that.” Gendry wasn’t sure. He thought of his daughter’s namesake, the cousin he never met who taught an illiterate man to read and was burned alive. He thought of the endless faces of the dead, conscripted to fight for the creatures that had murdered their families. He wasn’t sure, but he knew enough to be grateful for what he had, either way. “Go back to Storm’s End. Think about what I’ve said. I’ll come back in a day or two, and we’ll talk again.”

~

By the time he arrived back at Storm’s End, it had started to rain and the evening meal had already been served and cleared away. The first place he went was to his council chambers, where he tore off a bit of parchment and started writing a note to Arya to meet him in his quarters that night. Halfway through writing it, he realized that she had never been to his private quarters and likely had no idea where they were, so he burned the original note and started again on a bigger piece of parchment. Underneath the message, he drew her a map of the castle with an arrow leading from the guest wing to his family’s chambers, an X marking the door she would need to find. _You’ll need to sneak past a guard_ , he wrote underneath his makeshift diagram. Feeling more than a little ridiculous, he slid the note under Arya’s door and hurried off before anyone could spot him. 

Waiting for her later that evening, his stomach a seething cauldron of nerves, he wondered at the fact that he seemed to actually enjoy putting himself in her power like this. If she came, he would find it difficult to contain his happiness; if she did not, he would be as disappointed as he could remember being since the last time she had rejected him; either way, he would have no regrets at all. Did she ever feel the same way around him? Probably not, he thought, but it didn’t much matter. Just so long as she came.

When the door started to open, he stood from where he had been sitting on the edge of his bed as though he’d been burned. She slipped into the room and closed the door behind her in one swift, silent motion. “You got my note,” he said.

“Yes, although I could barely read it. You write like a ten-year-old.” He had vaguely imagined them attacking each other like wild animals as soon as she arrived, but of course Arya had no idea what had happened in Tarth. He stood there and stared at her, full of longing and at a total loss for words. “Why did you ask me here?”

“Alyse knows. That I kissed you. She’s fine with it,” he blurted out. 

“She’s _fine_ with it?” Arya trusted him not to try to deceive her, he knew that much, but this seemed to strain her credulity.

“She hasn’t felt that way about me in a long time. We’re working out an arrangement. Which means I can kiss you again. That is, if you want me to.”

She took this in, her expression caught somewhere between surprise and faint fear. “What of your vow?”

He considered this. “I’ve never put much faith in the seven. Even less in septons. As I see it, Alyse is the only person that vow should make any difference to. And she has released me from it.”

Arya nodded, looked away. “You surprised me, the other night. When you kissed me.”

“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “That was… ungallant.”

“I didn’t mind,” she said, smiling a little at the ground. “It explained why you’d been acting so strangely. You should have just talked to me.” Gendry fidgeted a little, feeling awkward. He was wearing a simple shift and breeches, no shoes or socks, which only heightened his sense of being exposed and at her mercy. There was something thrilling about it, but it was also nerve-wracking, particularly when she’d barely moved since entering the room. “I like your chambers,” she said. “A lot less frippery than in mine.”

“This is more after my taste. Please, sit down.” She looked around as if to ask where. “There are…” he gestured at some chairs on the other side of the room. “Or…” He sat down on the bed and motioned next to him. 

She slowly walked over to the bed and lowered herself onto it, bent over as if to unlace her boots. “May I?” she asked.

“Of course.” _Take off anything you want_ , he thought, but she didn’t seem to be in the mood for jokes. Neither was he, if he was honest. His heart was pounding, although much of his nervousness had vanished the moment she’d entered the room. 

She left her boots in a pile next to their feet. “I spoke with Eddard today,” she said. “He wants to establish a trading post here.”

“I can introduce him to the right people,” Gendry said brightly. “All we really have to export is wool, but if he can find someone who wants it…” It was odd to sit on his bed with her and talk about their son; he had the disquieting feeling that he was experiencing his life as it might have been. “You raised him well.”

“It wasn’t my doing. We all raised him, on the ship. He was delivered by my second-in-command, you know.”

“What, no midwife on board?” 

She smiled. “We didn’t even have a Maester. Rodrick had never seen anything like that before. He was… shaken.”

“I’ve heard there’s a lot of blood.”

“Blood is the least of it. Imagine seeing your captain get ripped apart and having to take orders from her again an hour later.”

“Was it as bad as all that?” he asked. It was ridiculous for him to be so concerned about something that had happened seventeen years ago and that she’d obviously survived, but he couldn’t help it.

“It takes a lot to bring a life into the world. A lot more than it takes to kill, as it turns out.” 

She had let her hand fall onto his thigh, so he picked it up and laced her fingers through his. “Why did you stop fighting?” he asked, flushing a little at the contact.

“Because I didn’t have a reason to, anymore. To fight without cause is foolish. Waste of energy.”

“But you love it,” he said. 

“You loved being a smith, didn’t you?” Suddenly he was out of things to say. He was still holding her hand; when he rubbed the seam of her palm with his thumb, he noted how her breath seemed to quicken. Arya had edged herself closer to him over the course of their conversation, so that their knees were now touching. She laughed at herself when she had to suppress a yawn. “I’m tired,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well the past few nights.”

“Want to go to sleep?” he asked, his voice low and amused. 

Their eyes met, and her hand in his stilled. “No,” she said.

Where their last kiss had been mindless and frantic, this one was gentle and almost sweet. _I can touch her_ , Gendry thought as he gingerly wrapped his arm around her waist to bring her closer. She kissed him again, her hands coming to rest on his chest, and then she peeled off his shift and paused for a moment to look at him. They were still sitting on the edge of the bed, shy for some reason and a little hesitant, although her eyes as she took him in were dark and hungry and he imagined that his must have looked much the same.

Before too long, their tentativeness went the same way as their clothing; it was difficult to be shy when she was a warm, naked streak of quicksilver in his arms. He was hovering over her and lining himself up with her entrance when, in a maneuver that made his whole body flush, she slicked her hand with her own wetness and wrapped it around his cock. “Not yet,” she said, watching his face as she stroked him. It stood to reason that she would tease him shamelessly, he thought; when she leaned forward to kiss him, he could feel her mouth smiling against his as he stiffened further in her hand. 

When he finally entered her, she inhaled sharply and clenched around him, her head falling back onto the pillow. He cursed with the sudden tight heat of her; knowing that his arms were about to buckle, he dropped his full weight onto her as gently as he could and shifted his hips until he was fully seated inside her. He could feel her start to writhe, looking for friction, and he smiled with the knowledge that he could tease her, too, even as his eyes fluttered shut and his chest heaved from how good it all felt. 

“How’s that?” he asked, slyly. She made a gratifyingly undignified noise in response. “Hmm? It’s good?” She clenched around him again, her eyes full of challenge, so that he was the one whimpering. 

When he started to move, her hands grappled for purchase on his back, finally coming to settle on his shoulders. He tried kissing her once or twice but found that he actually preferred to hang back and watch her face while they were doing this. There were times when she appeared quite focused, times when she seemed only blissful, and times when she would grin at him wickedly, which were his favorite. As he found a rhythm – he was a little out of practice – she canted her hips to improve the angle, pushing herself against him in time with his thrusts. This he remembered from when they were younger, how she never just lay there as other women sometimes did, how she always showed him what she wanted with her body. 

Eventually she asked to go on top of him, to which he happily acquiesced. He loved being able to look at her, the way her gaze stroked his chest just like her hands did and the soft little sounds she made every time she rocked against him. Although they weren’t always so soft. 

“It’s a good thing this place has thick walls,” he said approvingly. “You still like being on top, then?”

She looked down at him with hooded eyes. “I like all kinds of things.” 

She always knew exactly the right thing to say, he thought, the thing that would drive him the most out of his mind. “I’m sure you do,” he said. Her laughter as he grabbed her by the hips and flipped her over dissolved into helpless, shocked moans as he brought her legs up to rest on his shoulders and drove into her mercilessly. 

As some point they were both in need of a rest. They lay there, her head against his chest, and listened to the raindrops slanting against the windowpane. Gendry was stupidly, unreasonably happy. He was going to have to get Alyse a gift for allowing this, he thought. Something nice. A few weeks ago she’d said something about commissioning a new chandelier for the Round Hall, and he’d waved it off as needless extravagance – done. He smiled at the ceiling and ran his fingers through Arya’s hair, hardly believing his luck.

She sat up to look at him. “When I decided to come back, I didn’t expect this,” she said, her eyes wide.

“Neither did I,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d still like me. I’m a different person now.”

“But you thought you’d still like me?”

“Of course I did. You broke my heart when you left, Arya. I got over it, but I didn’t forget you.”

She danced her fingertips across his chest. “I’m a different person, now, too,” she said thoughtfully. 

“Yes,” he said, pulling her closer. “You’re better.” When she kissed him, he decided that he’d had enough of a break and rolled on top of her; she was still so wet, and they were both so slick with sweat, that slipping inside her again was as easy as breathing. The smile on her face when he pinned her hands above her head and moved inside her made his breath catch in his throat. Suddenly he was acutely aware of the fact that he would never be able to touch her outside of this room. More importantly, she was leaving in a few weeks’ time, and he had no idea when they would see each other again. For a moment, it seemed as though the desolation of this would swallow him whole; but right now she was here, so he lost himself in her eyes and her smell and the way she sighed when he couldn’t get any deeper inside her and ceased to think of such things.

Some time later, when his movements started to take on a certain urgency, she said, warningly, “I’ve no moon tea.”

He stilled and said, with a voice full of skepticism, “Can you still…?”

She shoved him off her. “I’m not _that_ old,” she said, as he laughed and laughed. She crossed her arms and glared at him with mock indignation. “I was going to do something else for you instead, but I don’t think I should bother, now.”

“It was a joke! Come here,” he said, as she hit him on the shoulder. He gathered her up against his chest, kissed her and tried, with limited success, to neaten her hair, which was tangled in the front and matted in the back from having been pressed into the mattress in various ways. When she pushed him onto his back and started to kiss her way down his torso, it took him a moment to work out what she was getting at, so infrequently had anyone who wasn’t being paid offered to do such a thing for him. It wasn’t an act that ladies were generally willing to perform. “You don’t have to do that,” he said tenderly.

She rolled her eyes. “You say that like I don’t want to.”

“Well, I won’t complain if – ah, seven hells.” It was a good thing that Arya was no kind of lady, he thought as her mouth closed around him. 

It took a moment for his head to clear after he spent. Arya was upon him immediately, her hands roving up and down his body and her legs wrapping around him; he cooed with sympathy when he realized that she was desperate for release. She worked furiously at her cunt as he rubbed her breasts and kissed her neck. Eventually he worked up the nerve to replace her hand with his. “Is this all right?” he asked, worried that his large, clumsy fingers wouldn’t please her. They’d never done anything like this when they were younger. They hadn’t known how.

“Yes,” she said, grabbing onto his shoulder. “That’s it.” It didn’t take long after that. Her face screwed up with concentration, she bore down on his hand until she cried out, her eyes rolling back in her head. He kissed her through it, slipped two of his fingers inside her and felt her tighten around them. As it crested, she shuddered and opened her eyes again to see him smiling down at her. She smiled back, grateful and sated, and burrowed into his chest in the aftermath. 

A little while later, when they were both half-asleep, he said, “You’ll need to leave before dawn.”

“I will,” she mumbled. 

_I wish you could say_ , he thought, but saying it would only make him sad. Her, too, possibly. So instead he kissed her one last time, slung an arm over her side, and went to sleep. When he awoke, it took him a moment to figure out why he felt so content, until he buried his face in a pillow and found that it still smelled like her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sex scenes that start off a little awkward and devolve into complete filth by the end are kinda my thing, so. I hope you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope it felt earned and in-character and all that jazz.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I attempt to tie things up in a passably satisfying fashion.

A few days later, Gendry went up to go for a walk around the battlements and found Shireen, Eddard, and Prince Ned talking amongst themselves as they looked out over the bay. The three of them had formed fast friends since the latter’s arrival and were rarely seen not in the others’ company. Gendry greeted them in passing, assuming they would rather he leave them alone. 

“Lord Baratheon?” It was the Prince, his tone respectful and curious. His voice, unlike his mother's, had a strong flavor of the North about it. “The Lady Shireen says that you were at the Battle of Winterfell?” 

“I was.”

“Where were you when Aunt Arya killed the Night King?” 

All of them, his two children as well as the Prince, seemed genuinely interested. If Shireen had ever heard this story, then it must have been when she was too young to remember it properly; it had been years since he’d spoken of such things. He told them of the mace he’d made himself, of the way he’d found that it was possible to keep fighting even when he was so exhausted that he could barely lift his arms above his waist, when the choice was between fighting or certain death. He described the exact spot in the yard where he’d been standing at the end of the long night, making Prince Ned’s face light up with recognition. He told them of the dead falling around him, of how he hadn’t believed his eyes at first, and of how he’d somehow suspected, even though it had seemed impossible at the time, that Arya had had something to do with it.

“And then what did you do?” Ned asked.

“After the dead fell? I ate three bowls of soup and two chickens, and then I slept for a day and a half.”

Shireen and Ned laughed at this, but Eddard seemed to find it perfectly sensible. Gendry smiled at him before starting off towards the seaward end of the battlements. 

“Father?”

Gendry paused, equal parts surprised and pleased. It made sense, somehow, that Eddard should name him in the same way that he’d named Eddard during that feast that already seemed to have happened a lifetime ago. When Gendry motioned for Eddard to approach him, he left Shireen and Ned idling next to the ramparts. They were standing a bit too close together for Gendry’s liking, but the Prince seemed like a decent enough lad, and anyway it wasn’t as though the boy would be foolish enough to try anything with her father so near. “Eddard?” he asked.

“What’s that on your face?” 

Gendry rubbed the offending spot to find that he must have smeared himself with soot earlier that morning. “I was in the forge,” he said, a little abashed. 

“You’ve been smithing again?” This seemed to amuse him, but in a good-natured rather than a mocking way.

“Mostly I’ve just been trying to remember where everything is. But yes, I have been. Come back after I’m back in practice and I can show you a thing or two.”

“I’d like to come back a bit later in the spring, after the storms have died down.” 

“Good luck on that one,” Gendry said. “But you know that you can come back any time you want? This is your home. Well, I know that your ship is your home, but Storm’s End can be your home, too.”

“It’s a pretty grand place to call home,” Eddard said.

“If I can get used to it, then you certainly can.” Gendry put a hand on Eddard’s back and led him down the battlements, glancing over his shoulder every so often to make sure that his daughter and the Prince were behaving themselves. 

Later that afternoon, Gendry was in his council chambers going over a proposed charter for a new settlement along the King’s Landing road. Marten, observing that his Lord master was perfectly capable of handling such a task on his own, asked if he might use the time to draft a raven to his brother, who had recently taken ill and seemed in need of cheer. Gendry bid him go, told him to take the rest of the afternoon off, if he wished. 

“Well, there’s no need for that, but I do appreciate the offer. If I may say so, milord, you’ve been in uncommonly high spirits since you cleared out the forge. I approve.”

It was unusual for Marten to say anything this solicitous; his mood must indeed have improved dramatically. Gendry felt a bit overwhelmed. “Thank you, Marten,” he said, returning with only slightly scattered attention to the charter once he had left.

Before too long, Marten came back to tell him that Queen Sansa had requested an audience with him. Gendry asked him to send her in. He pushed his paperwork aside, examined himself one last time for soot, and folded his hands across his desk as Sansa entered the chambers, all narrowed eyes and erect posture.

“This is quite a room you have here,” she said.

“I’m just its steward. What can I do for you, your grace?”

She sat down in Marten’s chair. “There are two things I need to discuss with you. The first concerns the matter of Eddard’s legitimation.” Gendry drew back, surprised. He had not suspected that Sansa would concern herself at all with the welfare of her bastard-born nephew, had rather assumed that she would have as little to do with the boy as possible. And yet here she was interceding on his behalf, although he very much doubted that Eddard had been consulted about any of this. “It doesn’t need to happen today, but it does need to happen. He isn’t the son of a servant girl or a tavern wench. His mother is my sister and a Lady in her own right, no matter how hard she pretends not to be. His uncle is your King. What plans have you made?”

“I haven’t made any plans. I’d need to talk to Eddard about it,” he said. 

“What is there to talk about?”

“I don’t know if that’s what he wants. He has no use for titles and such nonsense. Eddard likes the name Storm,” he added, a little wistfully.

“He won’t like it much longer if he stays in Westeros. Please don’t play the fool, Lord Gendry. I have no patience for it. You may have created a welcoming place for him at Storm’s End, but you know very well that titles and such nonsense matter very much to the people he’ll have to deal with in the future. Arya tells me that he’s planning to come back here to trade?” 

“I certainly hope that he does.”

“And how much more successful do you think he’ll be as Eddard Baratheon, legitimate son of the reigning Lord Paramount, than as the Stormlands bastard? That’s what people are already calling him, you know.” 

This was indeed troubling, although perhaps not as troubling to him as it was to Sansa. Gendry smiled, remembering the sound of Valyrian, Eddard’s wide honest face peering up at him through a mist of ocean spray. “When I told my son that I’d been born a bastard, do you know what he said? He said, that doesn’t make any sense, you’re either a bastard or you’re not. And he’s right. Daenerys Targaryen declaring me trueborn didn’t make my father any less a wedded King and my mother any less a tavern wench. And it didn’t much change the way people see me, either.”

Sansa knitted her brows. “Would you have been able to take Storm’s End as Gendry, nameless blacksmith from the Street of Steel? Of course it changed the way people saw you. It changed it tremendously.” 

“A technicality. I’m still a bastard to anyone who cares about such things.”

“Is that why you’re being so hesitant? Because you don’t want to admit that, given the choice, you’d rather have been born on the right side of the sheet?” Gendry stared her down, not willing to give her the satisfaction of a rebuttal. In any event, she was right. “Very well. In that case, think of the boy. I can tell that you’re fond of him. It’s what he deserves.”

“I’m not sure any of us deserves any of this,” Gendry said, motioning at the opulence around them. She pursed her lips at him, unimpressed, and he sighed. “What does Arya think about it?”

“I haven’t asked her,” Sansa said pointedly. “I expected her to be just as obtuse about the whole thing as you’re being. And anyway, it’s not her name he’ll be taking on. It’s yours.”

“Let me be clear. It’s not that I wouldn’t want Eddard legitimated. For me, the problem is that you seem to have made the decision for him.” Gendry wasn’t sure that she would understand what he was about to say. He knew that in her youth she had suffered terribly at the hands of various men, but she had also been born to it in the way that every Lady was. She might not know that, in many respects, the lowborn enjoyed a freedom that their supposed superiors could only dream about. “Until I was twenty-three, everything important that ever happened to me happened because some highborn or their lackey decided that was the way it should be. I won’t do the same thing to my own son. If he wants to be Eddard Baratheon, I’ll have it done in a second. I’ll be honored to do it. But it will be his choice. Not mine, and not yours.”

Sansa shrugged. “The world we live in will choose for him. But you can certainly pretend to leave it up to him, if it makes you feel better.”

“It does,” he said, unashamed. 

“Very well. Your trueborn daughter will remain your heir, of course. Although…” Here she paused. “I believe that being the future Queen in the North will keep her occupied enough.”

This was equally unexpected. The idea had crossed Gendry’s mind, but he had never allowed himself to imagine that Sansa would deign to make him such an offer. “I take it you’ve come to the second thing you wanted to speak to me about?”

Sansa was more relaxed now; she knew that she had the upper hand. “I’ve been very impressed with your daughter. She’s intelligent, and more importantly, she knows her own mind. My son is also intelligent, thank the gods, but he can be too kind-hearted for his own good. He will need a woman like her by his side. You must have noticed that Ned is quite taken with her. And I believe the attraction is not one-sided.” 

_Shireen likes a different boy every other week,_ he thought. Then again, it was true that she hadn’t paid much attention to anyone else since the Prince’s arrival, and anyway that was hardly the sort of thing he should say to his daughter’s future mother-in-law. He was going to accept, of course he was, but it was still rather galling to have Sansa Stark of all people come swooping into his council chambers to solve all of his problems for him. “I wouldn’t have thought that you’d want your son and heir married to a Southron girl,” he said.

“We are not all as insular in the North as our reputation would have you believe. And after what happened to me, I made a promise that I would only let my children marry for love. I’m not saying that he loves her – ” she said when Gendry blanched a little. “It’s far too early for that. But I think he probably could. And strategically, it would not be the worst match. It would be useful for us to have an ally by marriage in the Six Kingdoms. It’s an even better match for you, in the long term.”

“How do you figure that?”

She smiled. “The Six Kingdoms will not last forever, Lord Gendry. My former husband is the only thing still holding it together. Once he is gone, and once those fools realize that Bran will simply let them leave, if they ask, Dorne and the Iron Islands will go the same way as the North. Will you then wish to remain in the Five Kingdoms? The Reach and the Rock are both larger than the Stormlands, and far richer. The Vale and the Riverlands are far away. If you stay, others will control your affairs, but if you leave, you will be King, and in need of allies. By that point, the North will have been independent and prosperous for decades. We will be able to help you, and your daughter will one day be Queen twice over.” 

How long had it taken Sansa and her party to travel from Winterfell to Storm’s End? A week, ten days? He wasn’t sure. Either way, the thought of sending his only daughter so far away to live amongst strangers, even trusted strangers, was not one that he entertained lightly. “My hesitance is selfish. Winterfell is far away. I don’t want to see her go.”

“You shall be welcome to visit her as often as your duties permit. And I wasn’t suggesting that she leave with us. Let us betroth them now and wait a year or two before they are wed. They can use the time to get to know each other better. I have found that friendship is the most fruitful ground for a marriage.”

“Indeed,” he said, unable to suppress a wry smile. “Still, it will be very hard on Alyse. And on me. This isn’t what we had imagined for her.” This was true, but he knew that Alyse would be beside herself with joy at the idea of her daughter being a Queen someday.

“I understand. You were planning on marrying her off to the son of one of your vassals, so that she could rule uncontested over the Stormlands and so that no one would bat an eye when she named her children Baratheon. But with Eddard legitimated, you won’t need to worry about the family name anymore.” She leaned forward a little for emphasis; he had to admire her persuasiveness. “Wouldn’t this be better for her? For both of your children?”

Gendry sighed. He had offered token resistance, as his pride demanded, so that now there was no need to belabor the point. “I’d be very happy to see her wed to such a fine young man. I’ll speak to her about it.”

“Good. I daresay she’ll be thrilled. I know my son will,” she said, standing. “Our houses have been friends for generations. Our fathers tried to unite them, and failed. You tried and succeeded, after a fashion. Let’s do it properly this time.” Gendry nodded at her. As she turned to leave the room, she paused again. “You’ve handled this situation with my sister with more finesse than I might have expected, by the way. I know you’re infatuated with her, and so does your wife.”

“Alyse left, though.”

“Yes, but then you got her to come back. I’d like to know how you did it.”

“You never will,” he said, smiling. For the first time, Gendry thought he could detect a modicum of respect in the Queen’s eyes as she looked over at him. “Is it really so obvious? About Arya?” he asked, worried.

The respect vanished, replaced by something like pity. “Get some sleep, Lord Gendry,” she said before leaving the room. 

Gendry comforted himself with the thought that just because the most observant person in the castle had noticed what they were up to didn’t mean that anyone else had. Then he closed the door to the council chambers behind her and collapsed into an armchair far away from the windows, intending to take her advice.

~

Keeping a secret was even more difficult than he’d thought it would be. It was difficult, when he saw Arya in the hall or on the battlements or in the yard, not to beam with besotted delight before dragging her off to some quiet corner to be kissed. It was difficult to conceal the true source of his happiness, as well as his creeping sense of doom whenever he contemplated her impending departure, from everyone around him. (Alyse knew, of course, but they had only spoken of it in the vaguest terms – he believed that she was genuinely glad for him.) Reminding himself that his discretion was a condition of Arya being able to continue to visit him in his chambers made the task much easier, however. 

They had spent most nights together ever since he came back from Tarth, getting reacquainted with each other’s bodies and sharing stories from the past eighteen years. Hers tended to be much more interesting than his, although he was proud of himself when he managed to make her laugh until she cried with his imitation of Yohn Royce at Great Council meetings. Gendry learned more about Eddard’s childhood, only some of it harrowing. He learned more about the Volantene Confederation of Traders than he thought he would ever have reason to know. He learned that Arya had had the same lover for two years when they were sailing around Slaver’s Bay, had even brought the man to live on the ship for a while, although she claimed that this was only because he was quite a good negotiator and they were engaged in some precarious deals at the time. Finding this out didn’t make Gendry jealous, only sad, for the relationship had ended in near-violence when she refused to grant him half of the shares in a contract she had arranged with a Meereenese merchant guild.

“I should have thrown him out sooner,” she said. “Eddard never liked him much, either.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“He was a good negotiator. And a very good lover,” she said. 

“Better than me?” Gendry trusted her to tell him the unvarnished truth; he was genuinely curious.

Arya shrugged. “No. Different from you. But I like you better. You’re better company, and much better-looking,” she said, looking him up and down with a relish that even after all the things they had done to each other still made him flush. She pressed a trail of kisses from his collarbone down to his stomach before resting her cheek against the lightly muscled skin just above his navel. “Alyse is mad if she doesn’t want you.”

“She has her reasons.” Arya crawled back up his torso and settled down on top of him. He loved to see her loose-limbed and easy like this; it happened so rarely. “Even you didn’t want me enough to stay,” he said.

She lifted her head to blink at him. “Wanting you more wouldn’t have made me stay. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I know. Sorry, I don’t know why I said that,” he said. He worried, for a moment, that he had spoiled things, but the way she buried her face in his neck again put his mind at ease. 

“I wanted you plenty,” she said, a bit muffled. “I still do, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed,” he said, smirking. She was still open and wet from their previous lovemaking; he slipped his hand between her legs to touch her in the way that she liked, his thumb rubbing in slow circles while his fingers curled inside her. By the time he replaced his fingers with his cock, she was a squirming, panting mess. “Can’t get enough of me, can you?” he said. She looked as though she very much wanted to offer up some rejoinder, but also as though she was too lust-addled, at the moment, to come up with anything. He took pity on her and kissed her, precluding the need for her to respond at all.

~

A few days before the Starks were due to leave for Winterfell, Gendry asked Arya to ride down the cliffside road and wait for him at the fork; instead of going left, towards the harbor, they rode an hour west, past the point where the pastures gave way to rocky hillsides. Turning off the road and towards the bay, they came to a shoreline with a small clearing next to it. Between hill and ocean stood a simple but well-constructed stone house with glass windows and three chimneys in the back, a small stables, a smokehouse, and a pier. Standing near the threshold, one could view the mountains to the south and west and the open waters of the Narrow Sea to the east. 

They both dismounted, Gendry looking around to make sure that they were alone. “What is this place?” she asked.

“It’s a fishing lodge. My father used to come here when he was a boy. I’ve never been much for fishing, but I’m told there’s plenty of cod.”

“It’s beautiful here,” she said, looking out towards the ocean. She smiled at him, clearly charmed that he’d brought her to such a place. 

“I thought you’d like it. I was thinking of offering it to you, actually.” He’d wanted to have this conversation in the cold light of day, away from his family and away from what he’d already come to think of as their bed. It seemed likely that Arya would have been happy to part from him later that week without exchanging a single word about the future, but she was made of sterner stuff than he. 

Arya looked at him sharply. “You want me to live here?” she asked. 

He shook his head. “I know you wouldn’t take it. You still want to live on your ship, don’t you? And anyway, how would Alyse feel if word spread that I put another woman up on my lands?” Arya’s eyes were full of sympathy, but he didn’t want her sympathy. He wanted her to be just as saddened and frustrated as he was. “What are we going to do, Arya? I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been, these past few weeks. But I’ve also been just as unhappy, because I know you can’t stay.” What he was about to say was disloyal and possibly dangerous, but he had to say it, anyway. “I’ve thought once or twice about having my marriage annulled.”

“You shouldn’t.” 

“You don’t need to tell me that,” he said, scowling. “I can’t do that to Alyse, not after everything she’s gone through for my sake. And there’d be no point, you wouldn’t marry me even if I did.” Arya didn’t correct him. She was too proud, and too decent, to participate in something that would leave Alyse and Shireen so publicly humiliated. “I do sometimes wonder, though. What if you’d come back and found me unwed? Was there ever a chance that you would have married me?”

“No,” she said. This was the answer he had expected. He must have looked crestfallen, nevertheless, because her face immediately softened. “I won’t marry anybody. It doesn’t mean that I love you any less.”

He wondered, not for the first time, why the best things in his life so often seemed to come wrapped in a pall of bitterness. “Fine. You love me. Maybe I love you, too. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“You don’t have to do anything with it.” Arya was only standing a few feet from him, but already it felt as though she were oceans away. She sidled up to him and put her hands on his waist, reminding him why he hadn’t wanted to have this conversation while abed. “You need a lady to help run your household and stand in your shadow. That’s not me. And I won’t be your kept woman, either. But I can be something else to you, if you’ll let me.”

“What’s that?” he asked, smoothing an errant lock of hair off her forehead. 

“Your friend, always. Your lover, when I’m here. The mother of your son. Your family.”

_I already have a family,_ he thought, but Arya played by different rules. If she said he was her family, then he was, and nothing he did or said would make any difference; he had learned that, by now. He pulled her closer, his hands edging past the small of her back. “And how often will you be here?” he asked.

She shoved him a little, playfully. “Must everything be about sex, to you?”

“That’s not what I meant. Well, that’s part of it,” he admitted. Her implication that she would share his bed again in the future had been of some comfort, but it wasn’t enough. “I want to see you,” he said, his eloquence deserting him.

“You will. I’ll come here with Eddard a few times a year, and you can see me sometimes when you visit Shireen in Winterfell. I’ll be sailing much of the time, anyway. We’ll send each other ravens.” 

“You want me to send you ravens?” he said with a sad smile. “I thought you couldn’t read my handwriting.”

“I said I could _barely_ read it. It’s not that bad, for a smith.” He laughed at this but couldn’t quite meet her eye. She had tucked her hands into his vest, her face mere inches away from his. “It might seem hard right now, but trust me. You don’t want to marry me, not really. I’d be an awful wife. And this way, you’ll never tire of me, because there will always be times when you miss me.”

“I could never tire of you.”

“You might, eventually,” she said, and sighed. “Please, Gendry. This is what I can offer you. Don’t turn it down because it’s not what you thought a happy end looked like.”

It did seem hard, and he thought that his heart might break for a second time because of her. But he trusted her, and she seemed so sad and forlorn looking up at him like that. When she stood on tiptoe to kiss him, he couldn’t find it in himself to resist. The kiss turned filthy, as most of their kisses eventually did, and he laughed a little when they broke apart, knowing that she could probably feel his arousal through their clothes. 

“Should we go inside?” she asked, raising her eyebrows suggestively. 

“Why not just do it out here?” he asked, only half-joking. She had already started towards the door. “There’s no one around.”

“Really? You want to make love on a beach? For one of the most pessimistic people I know, you do have some very soft ideas sometimes. Come on, I’m not getting sand in me.” This time, when he followed her, there was no pessimism in it at all. 

~

The day of the Starks’ departure dawned bright and clear and slightly windy, perfect weather for sailing. Gendry and his family rode with their guests to the harbor to see them off. On the dock, the whole lot of them milled about chaotically, saying goodbyes and engaging in last-minute conversations as Arya’s and Queen Sansa’s crews readied the ships. 

After bidding farewell to the Queen and her husband, Gendry drew Eddard aside. “Before you go… I believe you wanted to see some of my work.” Gendry reached into his vest and pulled out a knife, which he handed to his son. “It’s yours. For your collection. It would have been better workmanship if I’d had Jeryl do it, but I wanted to make it myself, so.” 

“You made this? Thank you,” Eddard said, testing the grip. 

It was a single piece of steel, small enough to easily hide, with a sharply tapered edge and a curving tip. On the handle, Gendry had engraved a stag after one of the patterns that he favored – he didn’t consider himself much of an artist, so he’d picked something simple. “It’s the sigil of my house,” he said.

“I know that. I close my eyes and see antlers, after being up there for a month,” Eddard said, gesturing at the castle. 

“I know you think it’s silly, but. It could be your house, too, if you want it to be.”

Gendry looked at him to make sure that he understood his full meaning. Eddard’s eyes widened a little – like both of his parents, he was prone to strong emotion but slow to show it – and he nodded. “Thank you. I’ll think on it,” he said. 

He waited for Eddard to tuck the knife into his belt before he embraced him. It was a little awkward, but Gendry found that he didn’t mind. Over Eddard’s shoulder, he could see Arya watching them with as warm a smile as he’d ever seen on her face. He could see his wife deep in conversation with Queen Sansa, and off to the side his daughter standing side by side with her betrothed. Ned whispered something in her ear that made her blush; for a moment, Gendry had a hope that the next generation would manage things better than they had, that they would find love and friendship in all the places that they were supposed to. In his heart of hearts, he knew that this could never be the case, that they, too, would make mistakes and live to see most of their plans go awry. Still, for just a moment, he let himself be hopeful. 

Eventually it was time for him to say goodbye to Arya. It was disorienting to hold her and to breathe in her smell in front of everybody like this; he broke away quickly. “Don’t wait eighteen years this time,” he said. He’d meant it as a joke, but his voice was gloomy. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.” They’d said a proper goodbye early that morning; already he was planning what he might write in the first raven he would send her. He tried to smile at her, glad that he was facing away from the rest of the group. She hugged him again, smacking him when he tried to wriggle away. “Remember what I said,” she whispered in his ear. He wasn’t sure what she was referring to – that she loved him? that she was his family? that it was somehow better that they should part in this nerve-wracking fashion? – and he didn’t ask, merely swallowed the lump in his throat and held onto her until she gave him a final squeeze and broke away from him to climb down the ladder to the waiting boat.

Watching the Starks sail away with his wife and daughter by his side, Gendry had to blink back a few tears but found that he was not nearly as unhappy as he had expected he would be in this moment. If there was a freedom in surrender, then there was also a kind of joy in giving in to his heartache, especially when the cause of that heartache had been something so wonderful. “I’ll miss him, too,” Shireen said, clearly intending to comfort him. He put his arm around her shoulders. 

“He’ll be back,” Alyse said. “They both will.” Gendry smiled at her, more grateful than he could express. Together, the three of them stood there looking out over the bay until the ships with the twin direwolf banners had both melted into the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halfway through writing this chapter I realized that I’d basically turned Gendry into Brandy from that Looking Glass song. _The sailors say Gendry, you’re a fine boy…_ Although Arya is definitely going to come back, unlike the dude in the song.
> 
> Joking aside, this fic saw me through a very stressful period of my life, and all of your comments meant so much. Thanks so much for reading, and for staying true to the good ship Gendrya as it sails off into the choppy waters of canon repair.


End file.
